


Everything Changes

by Silex



Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse)
Genre: All of the Viruses, Body Horror, Complete, Gen, Gift Work, I take requests, Infected Characters, Transformation, mentions a bunch of other characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-27
Updated: 2017-05-27
Packaged: 2018-11-05 13:07:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 26,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11014068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silex/pseuds/Silex
Summary: Natalia's own ideals have tempered the mind and goals of Alex Wesker, but over the years the two truly have become one. Idealism and madness mix with truly horrific results for all those unfortunate enough to be caught in her plan.





	1. Where it Began

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sacred](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sacred/gifts).



> A request from The Sacred and Profane over on fanfiction.net. Basically they wanted a fic set up where pretty much the entire female cast of the game series gets infected with the different viruses and transform into monsters. I took some liberties with their original request and this was the result.

Natalia Korda was free, it had taken just over six years, but she’d endured it all with a smile for through it all an end had been in sight. It had just been a matter of preparing for that particular end and she’d had far more than six years for that. The hardest part of the six years hadn’t been making the arrangements for her freedom, no, it had been maintaining and constantly embellishing on the story that would allow her to reach that freedom.

For six years she had lived as poor little orphan Natalia Korda, Barry Burton’s adopted daughter who just wanted to do so much good to try and repay all the nice people who had helped her. In reality she was…she didn’t know for sure. At the moment she was still building her new identity, her true identity. She knew that she wasn’t Alex Wesker, not anymore, though she had all of the dead woman’s memories and most of her ambitions. The problem, she supposed, was that she’d been living as Natalia for so long that Alex’s consciousness had become contaminated, or maybe she’d been contaminated by Wesker, it was hard to tell where one began and the other ended.

All she knew was that she had desperately needed to escape the confines of the Burton family and at last she was old enough to manage it.

She had access to the vast sums of money that Alex had hidden away before her death, gotten together the funds she needed to secretly purchase a small research facility in the hills of Greece, an abandoned Umbrella lab, defunct and largely forgotten. She’d known about it since before, though prior to her rebirth she’d dismissed it as too small, too obvious to be of any use. Now though, given the state Greece was in, all it took was a few ‘charitable’ donations and some bribes in the right places and by the time the refurbishment of the decrepit building began it no longer had any times to Umbrella. In fact, it had a lovely false history dating back to the Second World War as a place where research on livestock illnesses was conducted. That was why it was in such an out of the way place according to its new history, so that the country’s farm animals would be safe in case of an accident, which never happened.

Overseeing the repair of the lab was a pleasant diversion, as was stocking it. Being Natalia was wonderful for that, a non-entity building a non-place, all from the safety of the home of a hero.

The Burton family noticed her interests of course, her seeming obsession with bioterrorism, but that was all part of the façade. Poor little Natalia had been through so much, had such sympathy for those going through similar plights and she idolized the BSAA and similar organizations, so it was only natural for her to have an interest in such things, to want to help.

That was how she always framed it, the BSAA were heroes and she wanted to help them so very much, except she’d never get a job as a filed agent, actually saving actual people, would she? Because she was sick, wasn’t she? She’d been injected with the T-Phobos virus and as long as it lingered in her bloodstream she wouldn’t be able to do much of anything because what if something bad happened? The reassurances she’d received had been wonderful on so many levels. She’d gotten to meet Jill Valentine in person infected with the T-virus and who knew what else, but still fighting the good fight. Natalia had relished the chance to observe her, fool her. It had been pathetically easy because who would suspect anything of a little girl?

Jill had looked tired at the time, old, worn. Alex Wesker had memories of that, of the desperation that came with that state. Natalia couldn’t help but wonder if, given all she’d been through it wasn’t just Jill’s own determination that had kept her going, if perhaps it had something to do with the viruses she’d been exposed to. Albert had found something fascinating in her, so who knew what untapped wealth of knowledge waited in the woman. Natalia’s greatest concern was that something would happen to Jill before she got the chance to take a look and see what held her together. It was unlikely of course, thanks to Jill’s ‘chronic condition’ she wasn’t allowed on actual missions anymore, so it wasn’t as though she was at risk of being killed by a B.O.W.

Through Claire Redfield she was able to learn about another remarkable woman, Sherry Birkin. It was the name that got her attention, though learning that this Sherry was infected with the G-virus was fascinating. Working as a field agent of the DSO, Natalia was surprised when she got the chance to talk to her over the computer. Sherry wasn’t only perfectly human, she didn’t look her age at all. Likely due to the regenerative properties of the G-virus. She never got the chance to meet Sherry in person, but that was something she hoped to rectify.

It was just a matter of time and time was something she had in abundance.

She had a lab with specimens of some of the most famous and infamous Progenitor derivatives waiting for her and all she had to do was get there, which again, had been a matter of waiting.

And now that wait was over.

Natalia had always been a clever child, almost frighteningly smart, and now she was ready to finish her education. Thanks to her grades in school and the countless side projects she’d participated in, all part of the narrative she’d constructed for herself, poor little Natalia who never wanted to see anyone suffer like she had, she had her choice of Universities and money wasn’t a concern. Apparently schools were willing to fight for the attendance of a child prodigy, bioterror victim. What a story of triumph!

Because even universities wanted a part in maintaining the narrative she had so carefully constructed.

Her choice was easy, a prestigious university in Europe, one with a wonderful biomedical program for her to integrate herself into. It worked especially well because it put her in easy reach of the lab she was building.

A quiet girl, she’d keep to herself. No one would think anything of her not being seen on long weekends, off exploring or studying on her own no doubt, or so people would assume. In reality it would present her with the chance to visit her lab, if she even needed to.

Running things remotely felt safest, staying below the radar and leading a double life offered such wonderful protection, and because of Barry and his friends’ reputations, even if she did anything that might be cause for suspicion, no one would dare question her.

Infinite time, near infinite resources, and near prefect secrecy. What more could she ask for?

And the best part was, like all good lies, there was a fine thread of truth woven into it. It was true, she wanted to help people, she wanted there to be a cure.

After watching Spencer die a pathetic old man, watching her former self slowly lose to the battle to time, her birthright of immortality stolen from her by the ravages of a disease that not even the Progenitor virus could stop, she knew what she had to do. She did want to help, she wasn’t lying when she said that she wanted to find a cure.

A cure was desperately needed, to mortality, to humanity.

Like poor, magnificent Albert, she wished to elevate humanity, but unlike him it wasn’t about the select few, it was about the entirety of the species. A new genetic bottleneck wouldn’t bring about salvation, it would only further compound the problem. The Progenitor virus hadn’t been able to save her. It had stopped the disease, true, but it had left her merely mortal. A world of mortals, even genetically superior ones, wouldn’t work because the rest of the world would evolve as well, the Red Queen’s race, faster and faster always trying to keep up to stay in the same place. It was a concept that even Barry understood, he called it ‘keeping up with the Joneses’, but somehow, Albert, focused on the larger picture as he always was, had missed it.

Humanity didn’t need to be made more specialized, it needed to be made more adaptable, and the Progenitor and all of its glorious derivatives were the secret to unlocking that potential.

Just like Albert, she was fully aware that there would be loss, there would be suffering, but what remained would be superior, both adaptable and immortal and that was the key. Individuals freed from the confines of time would have the same opportunity as her, to play the game long term and from there, everything would change.

Everyone would change.


	2. Ada Wong

Ada was impressed.

For a place that had been abandoned since shortly after World War Two, there certainly was a lot of activity going on around the lab, not that it was noticeable at first. There was no set schedule to the deliveries that came, and when they did come it was under the cover of darkness. To someone just passing by, or even watching it on and off for a week, it didn’t look like there was anything going on there. Yes, the double fences, topped with concertina wire, were new, as were the locks on the gates, but that could just be attributed to security precautions to keep people out of an abandoned and crumbling place.

Except she’d given the buildings more than a passing glance, and after almost a month of watching and waiting, discrete inquiries through various channels, and a great deal of patience she knew for a fact that this was one of those cases where appearances were very much deceiving. The facility was active and something big was happening inside.

The building was lightly guarded, if guarded at all, which made sense. Staff was being kept at a minimum to minimize leaks, far more prudent that she would have expected from a rehabilitated Umbrella lab.

It had taken a lot of digging to uncover the true history of the facility, but when she managed it was hardly unexpected. It always came back to Umbrella, but this didn’t feel like Umbrella.

This was something new, challenging, and she loved a good challenge. It had been too long since she’d really had to test herself, and this certainly would be a test.

The moment she suspected that her employers were right and that they’d actually found something worth investigating as a potential resource she’d started designing her plan for getting in, creating a persona who would be welcomed into the facility, possibly even receive the grand tour given time.

Posing as a weapons dealer, specializing in those of biological nature, she had stablished contact with whoever was running the lab and offered to work as a supplier for them. A few simple transactions were made, each side testing the waters until there was some degree of trust.

Today they expected her, or really a bioweapons dealer named Agata Robeldo, to show up in person to deliver a plaga sample. Everything was in place, she even had the plaga, albeit a submissive form, rather than the promised dominant. She figured that by the time they finished testing and discovered the deception she would have found what she wanted and be long gone. If not she had an explanation for what had happened, a nonexistent middleman who could be blamed for the merchandise not being what was promised. It would, if she played her cards right, be and excuse for continued meetings.

Right now though she couldn’t help but be impressed with the precautions whoever ran the lab was taking. Instead of directing her to the lab itself she was told to meet a driver in a small town some distance away. It wasn’t even the town closest to the lab, which she felt was a nice touch. If she hadn’t already known where she was going she could have been going anywhere in the area. Even more impressive was that the nondescript car she was guided to had its back windows tinted so darkly that she couldn’t see outside.

She had at least made the attempt to sit up front, but the driver had apologized and refused. That was something she made note of, that the driver was more apologetic and polite than she’d anticipated, likely a lab tech then, given the task of picking her up, rather than a professional hired specifically for the purpose of retrieving her. She wasn’t sure if that was the first flaw she’d found in their precautions or an additional layer.

What she did know was that the driver took a roundabout route, making the trip twice as long as it should have been. Again it made sense. Someone who didn’t already know where the facility was wouldn’t be able to guess based on travel time. She was willing to wager money that the trip back would take an entirely different route, equally circumvent.

Finally they arrived at the facility and she pretended to be surprised, showing just the right amount of worry at its apparent state. The driver, now taking the role as her guide, was more apologetic than necessary, but not quite enough to set off any alarm bells, at least not yet. She was reassured that the state outside did not reflect the state inside and was given just enough of a look around to reassure her that the facilities were quite modern and that there would be the money to pay her.

She quickly sketched out a mental map of the layout, noting closed doors and areas that were deliberately avoided. Those places were of special interest to her.

After the quick tour she was brought to a room. Its original function was inscrutable, but it had been repurposed as a small conference room, a very small conference room. There was hardly room for the table and chairs in the center of it. The pot of coffee, a pitcher of water and plate of fruit and finger foods in the middle of the table was a nice touch, as was the laptop on the end of the table opposite to where she was told to sit and wait. Her guide didn’t even try to take her suitcase, which again she didn’t know what to make of.

She was told to help herself to refreshments while she waited.

Then she was left alone to her own devices. In a room with a laptop.

The opportunity perfect to the point that she nearly missed the sound of the door hissing shut.

It was the first real inkling of alarm that she’d felt. The door was airtight, the room had no windows. At the same time it made sense, this was a bioresearch facility after all, such precautions might be necessary. And the unguarded laptop was too good an opportunity to ignore.

It was already on and totally unsecured in any way.

As much as she wanted to see what was on it, she knew that it would be safer to copy the data for later. There would be other opportunities to snoop around electronically, from a distance even, depending on what was on the laptop and how it was linked to the rest of the network.

As she was copying the data a window popped up, blank, but the program itself was easily recognizable as some sort of video chat.

“Hello Agata,” the voice was flat, synthesized to disguise it. In fact the stilted pronunciation made her think that the person might be using a text to speech program, another layer of disguise. Interesting that they worried some lingering hint of intonation might give them away. That was something to consider for later, that whoever she was working with likely had a distinctive manner of speaking, one that might help her place them.

“Hello –” She paused expectantly, waiting for an introduction.

“I know, we haven’t been properly introduced so I should start. You’re Ada Wong, but do you know who I am?”

Damnit, she was either getting sloppy or complacent, or the person on the end was taking a shot in the dark and hoping that it hit.

She decided to go with that idea, giving a carefully practiced nervous laugh she replied, “I am very sorry, but you are mistaken.”

Her delivery was equally stilted, just enough of an accent to make it clear that English was not her first or preferred language. If pressed she would lapse ‘back’ into Spanish, which she could speak more than passably well.

“No I’m not.”

Lack of intonation meant that she had no way of reading them. They were good, but she was better.

“If this is a test –”

“It is.”

They’d cut her off again. They were good trying to keep her off balance, but she was too good to let it have any effect.

“I can assure you that I will tell no one about this place. I don’t even know where it is,” she continued as though she hadn’t been interrupted, “The plaga is good. If you send someone into take for testing you will see for yourself.”

That was good, they’d let her say all that. They were interested.

“It’s not that kind of test. You are Ada Wong and at the moment the second most dangerous person to me. I hadn’t planned on trying to deal with you so soon, but since you were obliging enough to come here I will.”

Time to drop the act, “I’m flattered, but I think I’ll be going.”

The data was done being copied and there was no reason for her to stick around.

“You can try, but I hope you don’t mind me talking while you do.”

They could talk all they wanted, she didn’t have to say anything.

The door was interesting, locked of course, both mechanically and physically. Between the two she figured it would take her about two minutes. A minute and a half for the electronic half and thirty seconds, if that, for the mechanical.

“I’m willing to admit, I find you admirable. A woman on her own, living by her wits and constantly reinventing herself. I’ve learned that can be difficult, but it can be fun as well. The obsession you inspire is what really fascinates me though.”

A pause, long enough that it confirmed what she’d thought, they were typing.

“Leon Kennedy has had you dead to rights countless times, but he let you slip away each time. You’ve driven Chris Redfield utterly mad, or at least the reflection of you has. And Derek Simmons was ready to destroy everything he had and more for the chance to hold the shadow of you. You know that was the purpose of the C-virus, to create a false you. Everything else was just a byproduct. It has me wondering, do you think that you’re compatible with it? Not an enhanced strain, something custom tailored, but the mundane virus.”

They were a fast typist.

All that it the time it took her to disable the electronic component of the lock.

“A shame I’m not sticking around for you to find out,” she teased, close enough to escaping that it was safe to indulge herself. There was no one on the other side of the door as far as she could tell and going by what she’d seen, if she had to fight her way out it would hardly be a fight. Lab techs, researchers and not much else. None of them looked like they’d be able to hold their own in a fight, let alone hope to stand in her way.

“Not really. The C-virus was designed to be aerosolized.”

The instant she disengaged the mechanical lock two things happened simultaneously. The digital lock reengaged and a puff of air blasted her in the face. The chemical smell of propellant stung her nose, made her eyes water.

Blinking and shaking her head she took a step backwards. She’d outsmarted herself. After all these years she’d walked into a setup so perfect that she hadn’t realized it was a setup.

Whoever she was dealing with had made it so they looked like taken just enough precautions to not be enough, hiding their underlying intent.

Their goal had been to trap her, but they didn’t have her just yet. What had happened with the lock was a clever trick, but now that she’d seen it in action she could work around it. Disable both locks simultaneously and…

She wiped her eyes to try and clear her vision.

When she touched her face her hand came away sticky.

They had sprayed her with something, but she doubted it was the C-virus. Yes, it was one of the easiest to get viruses, omnipresent after Tall Oaks and Lanshiang, but there was no point in infecting her.

Unless the goal was simply to get rid of her.

But after all she’d done, all she knew no one would want to simply dispose of her. It had to be a simple anesthetic, that was why her vision wouldn’t clear and her hands felt numb. They would want to capture her for questioning.

She wiped at her eyes again.

This time fine strands of some viscous liquid pulled away.

There had been water on the table.

Stepping back from the door she staggered over to the table.

Why was it so hard to stand up straight? Being blinded would be half of it, but the anesthetic didn’t seem that potent, she was still mostly lucid, even if her head was starting to ache horribly.

The sides of the pitcher, beaded with condensation, were so cold against her hands it burned. When she poured it over her face there was the unmistakable hiss of steam.

They hadn’t been bluffing. The C-virus caused a rapid rise in body temperature right before –

She fought back a scream when she felt herself ignite. Her sodden clothing half protected her, but everywhere it was dry it instantly caught fire. If not for her clothing it would have been a flash and then nothing, but her clothing clung and burned, the skin beneath blistering and breaking. The thick slime that welled up smothering the flames.

It was in her nose, her mouth, making it hard to breathe as she choked on the acrid smoke.

Dropping to the floor she rolled in an attempt to smother the flames.

Between her efforts and the slime she was able to put them out, get up to her knees, but that was all she could manage. She could feel thick strands of slime weighing her arms down, anchoring her to the floor.

Moving was growing more difficult by the second as the slime began to harden. She could hear the thinner strands cracking like glass as she tried to break free, but the majority of it was far too tough, coating her in an unbreakable shell.

There was a fleeting feeling of suffocation, but it passed, a wave of weakness washing over her. For an unknown length of time she remained standing, immobile and completely isolated from the world outside of the chrysalis that encased her. The only sound was the frantic beating of her heart and she focused on that, struggled to keep calm, to keep sane in what was otherwise absolute sensory deprivation. She stopped willing her numb limbs to move and instead let everything shrink down to the beating of her heart.

Sensation returned, the pins and needles of circulation coming back to a limb, except it was her whole body. The discomfort grew to the point where it was pain, but it was something connecting her to her body. She could feel again.

Reflexively she tried to move and found that she could, small twitches within the confines of the shell holding her trapped.

Strength returned shortly afterwards and with immense effort she was able to move her arms, try to push her body against her prison.

The chrysalis cracked down the center of her back, the room’s air cold against her damp, slime coated skin.

It was even colder in her lungs when she inhaled, but what a relief to finally breathe again.

She twisted in place and what was left of the shell shattered, sending her sprawling on the floor. Everything felt wrong, her limbs were stiff from remaining still for so long, her body felt heavy, awkward.

Getting back to her feet, even opening her eyes was a struggle.

“Good, you’re done.”

She turned towards the sound, the synthesized voice on the computer.

“How long was I out?”

Of that was what she had intended to say, the words came out a wet hiss, slime dripping from her mouth.

“Can you talk? Do you understand me?”

No intonation, but she imagined that the person on the other end was excited, or maybe anxious.

Coughing to clear the slime she tried again.

“I can understand.”

The words came out a breathless, wet hiss, clear and understandable, but not her voice.

“I was worried when I saw the state you were in.”

Ada gave a dismissive snort, she sincerely doubted that.

“Come over here so I can get a better look at you.”

That was an easy request to ignore, especially when she had more important things to focus on, like getting out.

Then she caught sight of her hands, gnarled, sticklike fingers ending in short, sharp claws.

Those weren’t her hands.

Blinking, she rubbed her eyes with them, hoping to clear her vision, but there was no improvement, her field of vision had narrowed to the merest slit. Only by immense force of will was she able to open her eyes any wider. The muscles of her face felt wrong, pulled and stretched.

She stared down at herself.

It wasn’t her.

The thing she was looking at wasn’t her, it couldn’t be.

Pendulous breasts rested heavily against her chest, lost amid the collection of pulsing cysts covering her torso. Pores opened and shut in time with her breathing, releasing small puffs of yellowish mist.

“You see why I was worried?”

Fighting back a sob of terror, she staggered over to the computer. Its camera was on now, recording and showing the image on the screen.

She was herself, what she had become.

Small black eyes were lost in the swollen flesh of her face. Her nose was little more than two slits in the center of her face and her mouth…

That was probably the worst part, a lipless, rictus grin that split her face in two. Jagged teeth, too abundant and far too large to fit in her mouth glistened wetly.

What she was looking at was, she realized, unmistakable, a type of C-virus mutant that had been given the ironic nickname of ‘Lepotica’.

“I think I won this round,” an actual voice this time, high and childish, “But please Ada, try to prove me wrong. Keeping you contained will prove to be an interesting challenge.”


	3. Moira Burton

Moira woke up with a splitting headache, one so bad that the dim light of the room was agony.

“Goddamned shitting…”

She trailed off.

Where was she?

She hadn’t been out partying, that was for sure. She’d given up on parties since after…

No, she’d been visiting Natalia in college, because a European vacation with her family should have been awesome. So what had she been doing exactly? Sightseeing with Natalia.

Where was Natalia?

Forcing herself up so that she was at least sitting, she looked around frantically. Natalia was nowhere to be seen in the small, dimly lit gray room, three walls and bars across the front. A prison cell, or something close enough for it not to matter.

It was Sushestvovanie all over again, but how?

Past the bars was a dark shape, not a person, but a box on a chair.

Unable to stand she crawled on her hands and knees to get a better look.

It was a laptop computer.

“Good, you’re awake. I was afraid that they’d hurt you when they brought you here. It was a long trip and you had to be unconscious for all of it.”

The voice was mechanical, a stupid, synthesized robot sounding thing.

“Oh quit it with the mysterious bullshit,” she snapped, “It’s not like I’d know who you are or it would matter if I did.”

“You’re right,” the voice sent chills down her spine, “Or at least half right, it doesn’t matter, not anymore.”

“Natalia?” she couldn’t believe it, except she could.

“I suppose,” laughter, not that of a teenage girl, the sound was far too cynical for it, “Yes, that’s probably who I am now, but you suspected otherwise, didn’t you?”

Yes, yes she had. There were times when her family thought that she was too cynical, too suspicious of every little thing, but she’d known that there was something off about Natalia. She’d assumed that it would fade as the years passed and the scars of her past faded, but it had only grown more pronounced. Moira had dismissed it as jealousy or something like that. The girl had been a genius, too smart for it to be natural, but there was more to it than that. In rare, unguarded moments the way she looked at them, the way she looked at Chris during their infrequent reunions, was all wrong. Moira had seen it, a fleeting look of hatred aimed at Chris, one so intense, so absolute it had frightened her. And then it had been gone, as though she’d imagined it, but she hadn’t.

The questions Natalia asked, her interests, weren’t those of a little girl, no matter how damaged she might be. Her insistence that she wanted to help, wanted to save people, to do good, had always rung hollow.

Somehow Alex Wesker had survived, had become Natalia.

“You cunt-waffle little bitch!”

Moira threw herself at the bars and let out a scream of agony. Her headache went from splitting to blinding, jags of pain rushing down her back, scalding her eyes with tears.

She fell to the floor, gasping and gagging. Sickly sweet bile rose up in the back of her throat and she struggled to swallow it down, knowing that if she didn’t she would surely choke.

“Where am I?” She panted, then realized that was the wrong question, “Why am I here?”

Natalia’s laughter rang over the laptop’s speakers, “It’s the why that’s important, isn’t it?”

Moira gritted her teeth and pushed herself back up to her hands and knees. The pain was still there, throbbing agony resonating in every nerve, “Tell me.”

“Because you were convenient and because if anyone would have figured me out it would have been you. Don’t think I didn’t notice the way you would look at me. I had to deal with you before you made the connection.”

“What now?” she spat through clenched teeth, “Are you going to kill me? Experiment on me?”

“Not kill you, at least I hope not,” more laughter, “But yes, it is an experiment of sorts, one where I sincerely hope for success.”

“Going to jump bodies again? Sick of being a little girl?”

“Not at all, at least not at any point in the foreseeable future. I’m trying to help you though,” he tone became one of mocking pity, “I’ve learned from my own experience that humanity is far too weak, too fragile to survive on its own and I wish to preserve it, refine it. Preserving sapience is vital though, and most of the viruses, even those Albert had such an interest in, would destroy that. His ambition was a quixotic one, but none the less admirable for it. I’m trying to be more practical.”

The pain was getting worse by the second, invisible claws raking down her back.

Sobbing Moira rubbed at the back of her head, where the pain was the worst and wasn’t at all surprised when her fingers came away wet with blood. She vaguely recalled someone hitting her, or maybe hitting her head against something when she fell. The exact sequence of events was a blur.

“So you’re going to make me into a monster?” she stared at the blood on her fingers.

“No, that’s not my goal, though if it happens, so be it. If it did happen it would be through later exposure to something else.”

Something else…she was already infected.

“Yes,” Alex, Natalia, whoever she was, spoke softly, “I’ve decided to try something new with you. The plaga parasite preserves the personality of its host to some degree, at least the wild type does, types I and II have a far more deleterious effect, so I decided to go back to the wild type, with some modifications. I was inspired by some of Umbrella’s early work with a different parasite, a sentient cancer they called Nemesis. It was able to integrate itself into a host body with remarkable results. Drawing from that I’m attempting to turn the plaga from a parasite to a true symbiont. Unfortunately Ada Wong failed to deliver the dominant form that she promised so I had to make due. The subordinate plaga that you’ve been injected with has hopefully been modified sufficiently to achieve the results I’m after. We’ll find out soon enough I’m sure. It should be hatching any moment.”

-o0o-

The headache never left entirely, merely subsided to a constant, maddening pressure behind her eyes. A week, time measured only by waking and sleeping, and she was starting to get used to it.

By day three she’d been used to it enough to start pacing her cell and actively trying to find a way out. The bars were solid, thick around as her wrists, or they had been. That had changed since the start of her captivity. They were clearly intended to hold back something much stronger than any human, but she still tried. Of course, even if she managed to bend the bars enough to get through it wouldn’t have done her any good. The cell was set several feet back in the wall, a thick, clear glass pane sat past it between her and freedom. That was where the laptop had been when she first arrived, because the glass was too thick for sound to get through.

Men in biohazard gear brought her food, used catch poles and cattle prods to keep her back from then when they went in and cleaned her cell, forced against the wall to hose her down along with the rest of the cell. The humiliation was awful, but not as bad as being able to feel the plaga squirming beneath her skin. It was entwined with her spinal cord, woven into the muscles of her back and sides. If she looked down when she struggled, she could see in moving, limbs flexing beneath her skin.

The worst part was that it was growing and constantly hungry. She was constantly hungry.

It made little distinction between the men who brought her food and the food they brought and it was a constant struggle to keep it from acting. So far it had behaved, had listened to her.

She just wished that she could tell it to stop growing.

Because it wasn’t just the plaga that was growing.

The cell felt smaller, the ceiling lower, and after she outgrew her clothing the pile of blankets that passed for her bed covered less and less of her.

At least it wasn’t just her and the plaga. There was another prisoner, something massive and bloated that was kept in a cell across the hall from hers. A constant haze surrounded it so she never got a clear look at it, but when she watched it it watched her back. Whatever it was, it was in the same situation as her, maybe not the exact same situation, but similar enough in that it was intelligent.

It had taken time, but she’d managed to establish that. At first it would imitate her movements to get her attention, wave to signal when the men in biohazard gear were coming. The only problem was that the glass was meant that they couldn’t talk, if the thing was even capable of speech.

In time they would figure out a way to communicate, not because she though it would do any good, but because it was better than being lonely.

The plaga squirmed, reminding her it was there.

“You don’t count you overgrown tapeworm.”

It twitched, its most flexible set of legs moving to slide down her arm, holding her hand from the inside, making her fingers flex.

The plaga wanted to communicate as well.

The thing behind glass pointed and waved.

Instantly the plaga was on full alert. It knew what that specific gesture meant, that people were coming and bringing food.

For an overgrown tapeworm the plaga was perceptive. It tightened its grip beneath the skin of her arm, tensing so that she was able to see clearly where the joints in its limbs were. She had scars on her arms and back too, though those she couldn’t see, from when it had accidentally broken through her skin.

“Calm down,” she muttered.

Talking to the thing always made her feel crazy, but it listened. In time, when she figured out how to talk with her fellow prisoner, she’d also have to figure out a better way to talk with the plaga, one where she wasn’t constantly muttering to herself.

For now that was something that could wait. She could tell that the plaga was trying, but its excitement made it hard to concentrate. Between the two of them she was eating more in a single serving than she’d previously eaten in a day and neither of them seemed about to stop growing any time soon. If it kept up she’d eventually need a new cell, she could already touch the ceiling of this one with the palm of her hand, without needing to stretch. When it was time for that, that was when she’d have her chance to escape.

The plaga twitched, making her want to grab one of the guards and…

“I said calm down you miserable little freeloader.”

The thing in the cell across from her reached its arms through the bars, held up three fingers, then two, then gave the signal she’d learned the meaning of the hard way. Two of the men had the painfully bright, high powered flashlights they used when the plaga had started stretching its limbs out from beneath her skin to try and grab them. The light had been painful for it, driven it back into hiding.

At the signal from the thing in the cell the plaga grew still.

“Sure, you listen to that thing, but not to me.”

It twitched slightly, making her squirm.


	4. Claire Redfield

What had happened with Moira had left everyone on edge. They still hadn’t found her, though because of who she was, efforts were still being made. A ransom message had come less than a day after she’d vanished, the message itself originating in Belarus, but that was the most they’d gotten. A rescue effort was being planned, but they needed a more precise location before they could do anything.

And unfortunately life went on in the world around them. Claire had been in Europe, offering kind words to the Burton family who hadn’t left in the hopes that being closer to where Moira had vanished would somehow help. Her heart ached for them, having lost their daughter a second time. This time though, there was at least an obvious chance to get her back.

While there she’d started hearing rumors of a bioweapons research facility in Greece and she’d gone to investigate on her own, as much as an excuse to get away and do something as to kill time while everyone figured things out.

She hadn’t told Chris or any of the others, figuring that with what had happened to Moira they’d be needlessly concerned about her, besides, the lead wasn’t a particularly good one and if it turned out to be wrong she’d have wasted everyone’s time when there were far more important things for them to worry about.

And so far the lead looked like a bad one.

An abandoned building, the only thing new about it the double, razor wire topped fence around it.

She supposed that putting up a fence around an abandoned building to keep people like her from snooping around counted as work being done at an old bioweapons lab, but that wasn’t the sort of thing that one got the BSAA involved in.

Still, she was there and she might as well look closer. If she got caught she’d rely on her status as a publicly known figure to get out, besides, she could always mention the lead and that she thought it might help her find Moira. Because it was too impossible for her to believe that Moira’s disappearance had been due to random chance and kidnappers wanting money. Things like that just didn’t happen to people like her, except apparently they did.

All the doors to the building she’d tried so far were locked and the locks looked new, again supporting the theory that the supposed renovations were purely to keep people out. She kept going though, trying to make the trip worthwhile.

At the rear of the building her patience was rewarded, an unlocked door.

Inside, though the lights were off, she knew she’d found something. The place was sterile and sparklingly clean. In fact she could smell disinfectant. Taking out a flashlight she made her way down the hall, testing door after door until she found another that was unlocked. She swept the light across the room before going in. Filing cabinets lined the walls and a stack of papers sat on the desk in the center of the room.

Jackpot.

Smiling to herself she approached it and sure enough the papers all had the Umbrella logo on them. This was far more than she’d imagined finding. Umbrella was back and, apparently it was as prolific as ever.

One of the papers was a list of at least a dozen facilities and the amount of funding being allocated to them. The figured totaled somewhere in the billions and –

She heard a soft hiss and felt a sudden sharp pain in her back.

Whirling around just in time to see a black clad figure slam the door shut she realized too late that it had been a trap and she’d taken the bait.

Pain was radiating from a point high on her back, just off center of her shoulder blades. Reaching back she felt something. When she pulled it free she saw that it was a small needle, the tip wet with her blood.

She’d been injected with something.

Panic set in.

There was no reason to assume that it was anything more than a tranquilizer, except she was in what was obviously an Umbrella facility, unless that was part of the deception, that the door had been left unlocked and the papers put there to keep her distracted.

She tried the door.

It was locked, of course.

She was trapped, but they’d have to come for her soon, wouldn’t they?

Putting the flashlight down on the desk she walked a lap of the room, looking for something, she didn’t know what, maybe something she could use to escape or some sign of what was actually going on.

Whatever they’d injected her with, it was nasty. The pain was still there and she felt feverish, slight tremors running through her muscles, originating from where she’d been injected.

Maybe it was just a tranquilizer, she was definitely starting to feel light headed, spots dancing before her eyes.

Another lap of the room, just to be sure.

She tested the door again, it was solid, securely locked and made of metal, not something she could break down. She doubted that even her brother could have managed it if he’d been there.

God she wished Chris was there.

It was such a silly, childish thing, wanting her big brother to rescue her, testament to how afraid she was.

She was sweeting so badly that her clothing clung to her like a second skin.

Struggling out of her jacket didn’t help, she was still too hot.

She undid the top few buttons on her blouse and froze.

It hadn’t been a tranquilizer, she could see the muscles of her arms twitching, standing out like cords under her skin. They were larger.

Grabbing the light off the desk she shone it on herself for a better look. Her muscles bulged like Chris’ did after working out. Her skin was taunt over them, itching from the pressure beneath. As she watched, dark blackish purple bruises bloomed, blood vessels bursting under the strain.

Trying not to scream, because if she started she didn’t know if she’d be able to stop, she walked another lap of the room.

There had to be something, anything that she could use.

The desk’s drawers were all empty.

The filing cabinet after filing cabinet were all empty.

It had been a trap, an obvious trap.

And she’d fallen right into it.

When she got to the last cabinet, empty just like the others she threw it across the room with a scream of frustration. She could feel the seams in the shoulders of her blouse rip under the strain as she did. Two of the buttons burst over her heaving chest.

A sudden feeling of vertigo brought her to her knees.

Shaking, she clawed her way out of her too-tight blouse, ripping the thin, clinging fabric off her body. It helped, not much, but it helped.

For a time she stated there on her hands and knees, staring at the floor…at the ceiling?

“No,” the sound escaped her, a low moan of terror. Reaching back over her shoulder she stared at her hand.

It wasn’t the sight of her nails thickening and lengthening into claws that was so terrifying, no, it was that she could watch the process at all.

Frantically she scrabbled to her feet, grabbed the desk and shoved it at the door in a desperate attempt to escape.

The desk was lighter than she’d expected and it crumpled uselessly when it hit the door.

“Alright Claire, think, as long as you can think you have a chance.”

Her voice was different, shaky, but also harsher. That might have been from fear, or it might have been from changes that she couldn’t see. She licked her lips nervously, ran her tongue over teeth that were sharpening into fangs.

“Okay, focus,” she raked her fingers through her hair, felt it pull away in clumps.

The bones in her arms and shoulders ground painfully against each other, twisting as the way they were jointed changed.

Her boots pinched her feet, painfully.

Reaching down she struggled to unlace them, her hands little more than inflexible claws. All she could do was watch as claws tore through the toes of her boots, alleviating the discomfort somewhat. The claws of her hands were sharp enough to cut her boots the rest of the way off.

Another attempt at slamming the desk into the door ended when she felt something shift along her ribcage. Looking down she watched as shapes moved beneath her skin, stretching and pushing out until they formed a second, smaller set of arms ending in four fingered hands. Fingers, not claws. Having useable hands wasn’t a relief though, not when between them and the eye, she knew exactly what she’d been infected with. The G-virus.

She was trapped, infected with the most horrific of all the viruses she’d encountered and there was nothing she could do. Memories of what William Birkin had become flashed through her mind, degenerating further and further until…

It was too late.

Even if Chris was there he couldn’t save her.

Memories of William chasing Sherry, what he had done to her…

The most Chris would have been able to do was try to put her out of her misery before it was too late, not that it seemed that she had much time. The rate at which the changes were happening was impossibly fast, before long there wouldn’t be anything left of her. Given how far along they were it was amazing she could even think at all.

But as long as she could think she could keep trying to get out.

Shoving the table away from the door to clear some space she made an attempt at kicking it down.

To her shock she actually managed to dent the metal.

Of course, she looked at her arms, the main set, her real arms, were larger around than Chris’. The virus was making her stronger.

That might be what she could use to escape.

Taking a step back she tried again and again, until she overbalanced herself. Her changing build was top heavy between her new arms and the way her chest had deepened and her shoulders widened to accommodate them, but that wasn’t all. She could feel changes in her hips and legs, muscles stretching, bones rearranging themselves. When it stopped she couldn’t get back to her feet. The new structure of her back, of her legs, wouldn’t allow it.

She was stuck on all fours, all sixes maybe? She craned her neck and rolled her eyes to stare at her new set of arms. In the process she discovered another new eye, this one on the shoulder of her new right arm. Distracted by everything else she hadn’t noticed it until now.

Her chest spasmmed painfully, muscles pulling against her ribs as yet another change wracked her. She didn’t have to look to know what was happening, but she did anyway, watching as teeth burst through her skin in a line that slowly pulled open, extending her mouth vertically to about halfway down her chest.

“No.”

The word was a harsh wheeze from somewhere in her throat.

She could still speak.

How could she still speak?

Taking a deep breath, watching as her fanged maw opened slightly to accommodate the movement she tried and failed to make sense of things.

The muscles of her back twitched, stretching the base of her spine.

The eye on her back rolled in its socket to watch as twin bone spikes tore through her pants, extending rapidly, bone thickening and muscle surging over it as they extended into a pair of flexible tails. The tip of each remained fleshless, the bone hardening and growing over itself, forming heavy, barbed spears.

Watching them lash through the air behind her, feeling new muscles flexing, she realized that she could control their movements. At the same time she realized that the tremors that had wracked her body were diminishing. The changes had stopped, at least for the time being.

Now the shaking she experienced was from fear and exhaustion.

Unsure of what else to do she attempted to stand up.

It proved to be impossible. Her body had changed too much.

She took a few cautious steps, testing her new limbs. They worked well enough for walking, but she didn’t think she could manage anything more. Escape wasn’t going to be easy, even if she could get out of the room, but the least she could do was try.

Crouching down she lunged at the door and was caught completely off guard when it swung open. She stumbled into the hall and found herself surrounded by black clad figures armed with catchpoles. Before she could reach the prongs of a catchpole closed around her neck and she heard a high-pitched hum. More poles caught her arms and legs, pulling them out from under her.

She struggled, her strength surprising her when she managed to pull one of her arms free, jerking the man holding the pole off his feel in the process. Despite the others trying to hold her back she actually managed to take a step towards him, her tails held high, quivering in anticipation. She could fight her way out, claw them to pieces, stab them with her barbed tails, she could –

Electricity crackled and pain far worse than anything she’d felt during her transformation coursed through her. Her feet went out from under her and she thrashed helplessly on the floor as they dragged her off and put her in a cell.

By the time she was able to get back to her feet they were long gone and all she could was watch through the bars and glass as another group of men in biosafety suits hosed down an empty cell across from her.

But she could still think, she could still plan her escape.

Claws scraping across the concrete floor, she walked to the front of the cell and pulled herself up onto her hind legs to better watch what was going on.


	5. Sheva Alomar

Sheva was understandably nervous, it was her first mission as a Special Operations Agent. It was her chance to prove herself and there was so much riding on it. Fortunately she wasn’t alone. Jill Valentine was alongside her and while she had some misgivings about the partnership thanks to the circumstances under which they first met, she kept them to herself. Jill was a living legend and clearly knew what she was doing when they entered the compound in Greece, ready for anything expect what they found.

A completely empty hall greeted them when Jill breached the door. No guards, no scientists, no B.O.W.s waiting ready to pounce, or even zombies, nothing.

It was unnerving given what they’d been ready for, but Sheva couldn’t help feeling relief. Her first mission was going to be a mercifully easy one if things continued the same as they’d started.

The two of them started clearing the seemingly empty building, one room at a time. Room after room of storage, filing cabinets, computers, lab equipment, and, more often than not, nothing at all.

The number of empty rooms was heartening. Maybe whatever they’d found, they’d managed to get in to stop it before it even started. That would be an uninteresting, but impressive way to start her career as a Special Operations Agent, averting an incident entirely.

By the time they reached the end of the hall and moved down a level they were starting to get complacent from all the nothing they’d encountered. At the very least there should have been alarms going off if there was anyone in the building, but though the lights were on no one seemed to be home. In the interest of finishing what they were doing more quickly they split up. The hall was short enough that they’d never be out of sight of each other and if one of them found something that was actually interesting all it would take was a shout to let the other know.

Reaching the end of her half of the hall Sheva found something in the final empty room, but she didn’t know what it was that she’d found. The floor was glass and she was able to look down into the room directly below it, another empty room with grates along the floor. A holding cell of some sort, with a glass roof for observation. Strange as it was, it was also telling. No one went through the trouble to make something that elaborate unless they had something they intended to put in it. The fact that it was empty confirmed in her mind that there was nothing in the building.

Standing on the glass was disconcerting, like she was standing on empty air and she was just about to call Jill, let her know that she was done when she noticed something odd. The room below her was moving.

It took her several seconds, time that she didn’t have, to realize what was actually happening, the glass she was standing on was sliding into a slot on the far wall, pulling her farther from the door.

She tried to run, which proved to be a mistake. Her boots found little purchase on the slick surface and she stumbled, costing her more time. She was able to recover and stay on her feet, though not before the glass had retracted more than half way.

She was going to have to jump for the door and quickly, every second she hesitated made the task more difficult.

With only two feet of glass left between her and the wall she couldn’t even get a running start.

No time to think, just to act.

She threw herself at the door.

It was a clean miss, her fingers not even brushing the wall as she fell to the floor ten feet below.

Caught off-guard she landed badly and felt one of her ankles twist. When she tried to stand the pain caused her to fall back to the floor.

“Jill!”

The white haired woman came running took one look at the situation and nodded curtly.

“Don’t worry I can get you out,” it was a statement of fact, Jill was utterly confident, “You can stand, right?”

Sheva tried again and this time she was able to stagger over to below the door.

Jill got on her stomach and tried to reach down, but it wasn’t quite enough.

“Don’t worry,” Jill’s confidence never faltered, “I’ll go back and get a chair or something for you to stand on to climb out.”

She got up and left Sheva alone in the cell, but the situation could have been worse. Apparently even though the building was empty the traps were still active.

Sliding down to the floor she leaned against the wall, figuring that the least she could do was get comfortable while she waited.

It was only then that she noticed the far wall of the cell barred with a wall of glass beyond it, enabling her to look out across the hall.

Something massive, yet agile paced in a cell across from her, reminding her of nothing so much as a lion, even the way its two tails lashed through the air was reminiscent of a big cat. When the thing caught sight of her it lunged at the bars of its cage, pulling itself with massive, clawed paws, revealing a pair of smaller, almost human looking limbs tucked away behind and below its main arms. Its torso split nearly to its stomach in a gaping mouth fully of fangs. The glass was thick enough that she couldn’t hear its hungry roar, but she could imagine it.

Gratitude that she hadn’t ended up falling into a cell with that thing fought with the realization that something was going on in the building, someone had to be here for there to be a B.O.W.

She called to warn Jill, but there was no response, the older woman most likely well out of hearing range.

That wasn’t a problem though, she could wait. Being stuck in an empty room was nothing compared to what she’d been through in the past. This mission might still prove to be an easy one.

The B.O.W. in the cell across from hers continued to watch her, its frantic pacing and horrific appearance distracting her from the more humanoid form in the cell next to it.

A bloated, leathery looking…thing stood watching her, its seemingly calm behavior a sharp contrast to its neighbor.

Two B.O.W.s of two vastly different types. Something was going on and she had no idea what.

The second, more human looking thing pointed a clawed finger at her and then at the floor, repeating the gesture several times until she realized what it meant and looked down. Along the walls the concrete floor shimmered as something seeped up through the vents.

Sheva stared at it, painfully rising to her feet to move to the center of the room when the liquid continued to spread. She had no idea what it was, but given her situation she was ready to assume that it was dangerous.

Looking up from the floor she saw that the leathery thing’s toothy grin had fallen open wider as it nodded.

It was intelligent and had warned her of danger, that was something.

“What’s going on here?” she demanded.

The thing shook its head, drawing its hand through the air in front of its mouth in a negative gesture.

Right, the glass blocked all sound.

She pointed at it, then at the cell next to it with what she hoped it would recognize as a questioning expression. Its eyes were little more than slits in the doughy flesh of its face and she had no idea how much it could actually see.

It leaned forward, curiously.

She repeated the gesture, pointing emphatically at the cell next to it and then curved her fingers like claws.

It shook its head, pointed to the wall and made a negative gesture. Which it then followed with something more elaborate that she couldn’t understand, holding up its fingers, making a sweeping gesture at the hall that separated them, first one way and then another. It then pointed at the cell next to hers, hunched down and then stood up as tall as it could, stretching its hand high above its head. It finished by pointing in the direction of the other B.O.W.s cell.

She shook her head, none of that made any sense to her.

Clenching its hands into awkward fists it shook its head and tried again. It pointed at itself, then at her, then at the cell next to it and held up three fingers.

That she understood, two B.O.W.s and her meant that there were three of them down there. It continued to hold up three fingers, pointed at the cell next to hers and held up a forth finger before slashing its hand through the air in a negative gesture. Three of them now, but there might have been another that was gone now.

While interesting, it was unhelpful, at least at the moment. Knowing that there were two, possible three B.O.W.s held in the facility would be good for when Jill got back, but she had yet to return.

What was taking her so long?

The liquid had continued to spread during her conversation, if it could be called that, with the B.O.W. Now it covered the entire floor in a thin layer.

It was odorless and that was all she could tell about it. There was no way she was going to touch it.

Footsteps in the hall above.

She hobbled over to the back wall of the cell.

“Jill, thank goodness you –”

The footsteps stopped before the figure even came into view.

“No,” a muffled male voice, “But don’t worry, we captured her with minimal fuss so she’s not been harmed. And please try to relax, this will only be as bad as you make it. Once we’re done here you’ll be released and it won’t be bad at all. I honestly think you’re one of the lucky ones, or you will be.”

More movement and then, with a soft grinding noise a metal grate slid over the top of the room.

The footsteps moved away.

She was trapped, utterly trapped and helpless.

The liquid was rising higher, nearly an inch deep, it lapped against her boots.

Jill had been captured, no one was going to come and rescue her, at least not immediately.

How long would it take for the BSAA to realize they were missing? It would take an hour of radio silence at least and their radios had stopped working the moment they entered the lab. That might be a good thing though. Headquarters might have been trying to contact them, and when they failed to respond that would tell them right away that something was wrong.

Still, it would be safest to assume an hour to realize something was wrong, maybe half an hour to organize a response and another twenty minutes to deploy a rescue team. So she’d call it two hours.

Did she have two hours?

She looked down at the liquid.

It had reached the point where it was going to start soaking into her boots. She was pretty sure that they were waterproof, but that would only matter until the stuff got deep enough to go over the laces.

So she probably had plenty of time before the room filled, if that was the intent, but she had maybe five more minutes before she found out what the stuff would do when it contacted her skin.

The answer turned out to be nothing, at least as far as she could tell.

It was colder than the air, but that, she decided, wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. The cold soothed the pain of her injured foot, making it easier to stand, even as her sodden boots grew increasingly uncomfortable.

She wiggled her toes, curling them in the toes of her boots, which only served to make things worse, balling up her socks beneath them.

Her feet were already soaked, there was no point in making things worse for herself.

Lifting her injured foot she began to unlace her boot, thinking more of how she’d manage her other foot than paying attention to what she was doing. The laces had wicked up the water, dampening the tips of her fingers, but so far that hadn’t meant anything. Did she dare sit down to take off her other boot or could her foot support weight? Just taking the boot off had relieved most of the pain.

Gingerly she lowered her foot to the floor and found that there was little to no discomfort when she put weight on it.

Relieved she finished taking off her other boot.

The man had said that she was one of the lucky ones, that she’d be released. Did that mean that the liquid was harmless? But what was the point of it then?

It was deep enough that soon it would start soaking her pant legs. Even though it had proven harmless so far, she didn’t want that.

Bending down to roll them up she heard and felt the horrifying crunch as she somehow managed to roll both ankles at the same time.

There was pain as she fell forward, but it was nowhere near as bad as it should have been.

She caught herself, managing to keep from landing face first in the liquid.

Carefully, she pushed herself back so that she was sitting, her legs in front of her.

So much for keeping her pants dry, she thought bitterly.

The pain was already gone, which heartened her until she looked down at her feet. They were bent completely the wrong way. Terrified, she pulled off her socks, which was no easy task given that her toes had become bone spurs that snagged against the fabric.

She didn’t have to take them off to see what was wrong, but she did anyway. Her feet curved backwards, ankles bending the wrong way and her skin had hardened into thick, gray armor, locking them in that position. Her toes were little more than irregular spikes, curving upwards.

The humanoid B.O.W. across from her gestured frantically, unnecessarily, for her to stand up. The other had calmed down and was lying flat on its belly, head tilted to the side and pressed against the floor to watch the liquid rise.

As she rose shakily to her feet, leaning heavily against the wall to help her balance, it stood up as well.

It stared at her, mouth splitting open in a silent roar as it swiped angrily at the floor with one of its knifelike claws. Shaking its head, it stalked to the back of its cell and slumped down.

Maybe she was reading too much into things, but it looked disappointed.

The one B.O.W. was intelligent, it might have been as well.

And that was horrifying.

She stared down at her feet, all gray armor and curving bone. The spikes that had been her toes were growing longer, new little spurs emerging around their bases.

The liquid continued to rise and as it did she could feel the changes to her legs continuing, her flesh hardening, small spikes poking through the fabric of her pants at irregular intervals.

By the time it reached her knees she realized that the changes weren’t confined to her legs.

She’d put her hands in it when she fell and they were changing as well, albeit at a much slower rate.

The tips of her fingers had hardened into gray, bone claws and her fingers themselves had grown longer, inflexible gray armor covering them, while at the joints her skin had changed little, other than growing rough to the touch, so she could still move her hands, just not easily. A deep crease ran down the center of her hands, separating her first three fingers from her last two. It continued to grow, widening as her fingers stretched longer, until her hands were each split into two separate, independently moving units.

The whole process was uncomfortable, but not painful.

Across the hall the more human of the two B.O.W.s had turned away as well, giving her privacy, which she supposed she was thankful for.

When the water reached waist deep she lifted her arms to try and keep them out of it, pointless as the effort was. They were already covered in gray armor, studded in small spikes and where there wasn’t armor her skin had grown rough and almost spongy to the touch, bulging out from the joints and gaps in the armor.

The water reaching her stomach brought changes that she couldn’t see. She could feel things moving inside her, shifting and sliding around in ways that made it hard for her to breathe.

Higher and higher it rose, until she realized that soon keeping her head above the surface was going to be a concern.

Her sodden clothing would only weigh her down, so she stripped, giving herself a good look at what had happened to her. The gray armor completely covered her legs with a gap at her knees that allowed her to walk and another gap at the tops of her thighs. Along her hips and stomach the armor was all irregular patches, lumps and bone spurs that poked out of her skin.

The armor grew heavy again across her chest, curves in it reflecting the arcs of her ribs. Fused down the middle, no wonder it was hard for her to breath, there was no way for her chest to expand. Which raised the question of how she was able to breathe at all.

It was something she neither knew nor cared to know. In the BSAA the biology of B.O.W.s wasn’t a concern except for traits that made them more dangerous or weak points that made them easier to kill.

She’d expected that the armor would make it difficult for her to keep her head above water, but she found that she had little trouble floating when it reached that point.

Keeping her head above the water only worked to slow the process though, she could feel the changes creeping up her neck, the skin along her jawline itching as it hardened into plates of armor.

The water continued to rise until she was able to grab the grate above the room and pull herself with her long, powerful talons.

She clung to it, even as she felt her mouth begin to change, the bones of her skull shifting so that it could split her face vertically.

Her tongue swelled in her mouth, filling her throat, making it impossible to breathe, but she didn’t pass out. She could feel that she wasn’t breathing, but she wasn’t suffering from lack of oxygen.

She continued to hold onto the grate long after it was pointless.

The changes had stopped, the water had stopped rising and she was no longer human.

One of the lucky ones?

How?

She was trapped, a monster, and even if help came it was too late.

Letting go of the grate she dropped back into the water and slowly drifted down to the floor of the cell.


	6. Jill Valentine

It was humiliating how easily she’d ended up letting herself get captured. They’d cornered her in the stairwell, coming from above and below, trapping her between floors, keeping her pinned down.

The only reason she’d managed to hold out for as long as she had was because they hadn’t been trying to kill her. They’d been shooting at her, true, but only to hold her in place until another group of black uniformed guards arrived with tranquilizer darts.

She hadn’t known that they were tranquilizer darts, at least not at first, and she’d been terrified when they started shooting the needles at her. Redoubling her efforts to escape, she reloaded her rifle and opened fire, actually driving them back. Emboldened she pressed forward, thinking that she might be able to make a run for it.

It had simply been another layer of the trap. As soon as she stood up one of the darts hit her in the upper arm.

At once they stopped shooting at her and pulled back to wait. She managed to run up the stairs, stagger through the door and crawl half way down the hall before the drugs took hold and she blacked out.

Waking up had been returning to a nightmare, strapped down on a table in a lab, naked and helpless. Her first thought was that her freedom, being rescued by Chris and Sheva and everything since that was part of a dream, a figment of her fevered imagination as she struggled to hold onto her sanity as Wesker’s captive.

“Jill Valentine, it’s so wonderful to get the chance to talk to you, especially under these circumstances.”

Insane as it was given her circumstances, hearing the voice was a relief. It wasn’t Wesker.

She had no idea who it was, but it wasn’t Wesker.

“You truly are a fascinating specimen, or the viruses and antibodies in your blood are at least.”

The voice was familiar, but she couldn’t place it. They sounded young, almost childish, though there was a note of menace beneath the cloying sweetness of their tone.

Struggling against her restraints she raised her head and looked around in an attempt to find the source of the voice with no success. The room was empty.

“I know, I’d have loved to meet with you in person, but that will have to wait. Soon though my work will be done, thanks to you.”

“What do you mean?” She demanded, painfully aware that she was at the mercy of her unseen captor.

“The disappearance of Jake Muller,” the voice spat that name, making it sound like poison or profanity, “And the antibodies in his blood was a true loss. I know he’s out there somewhere, but that wretched bastard is good at hiding. From documents salvaged from Radames’ work as well as Albert’s notes on you I wondered if perhaps you would work for my purposes, recreating the enhanced C-virus and very soon we’ll know.”

It took her a moment to place who Albert was, Wesker, they were talking about Wesker.

Who was there that she knew of who had been on a first name basis with the man? The list was a short one and no one on it was still alive as far as she knew.

The voice continued speaking, “You know how easy the C-virus is to get ahold of, but its results are so unpredictable, unstable, not at all what I need. The enhanced version on the other hand offers complete control. I had samples of the base strain ready and waiting in the hope that I would find a way to get my hands on a sample of your blood. The BSAA tests you often enough that I’d figured it was just a matter of biding my time and finding someone who I could pay off. Instead you walk right into my lab, providing me with all I needed. Now I just need to see if it works and you’ll be helping me test it.”

“Like hell I will!” Jill spat, straining with all her might.

“You don’t have a choice in the matter. You _will_ be injected with the virus and it _will_ infect you. I’ve modified it to be sure of that. Much like Uroboros there is no immunity to this, or at least there shouldn’t be. If it can infect you it can infect anybody and we’re about to find out if it can.”

The door slid open and Jill expected to meet her so far faceless tormenter. Instead a man in a black biosafety suit came in, carrying a metal tray. The single syringe on it rolled back and forth as his hands shook. When he put it down on a smaller table next to the one she was strapped to he stopped to lean heavily against it and take several deep breaths.

He was terrified.

Of her.

“Enough,” the voice scolded, “Hurry up and inject her.”

The man nodded, muttered something too quiet for Jill to hear, and picked up the syringe.

Clearing the air from the needle he sunk it deep into her arm and depressed the plunger.

Liquid fire ran through her veins, scalding her from within. It felt like she was boiling, sweat sizzling on her skin, turning into steam.

The man staggered back.

In her throes of agony she arced her back and managed to snap free of her straps binding her arms. Through the pain she could feel impossible strength building within her, but the pain, it threatened to tear her apart.

It felt like her skin was about to split, peel back from the heat.

And it did, steam rising up from the wounds that opened up across her body.

The pain remained undiminished, muscle and bone pulling itself apart, reforming into new shapes in an attempt to vent the agony building within, streaking her vision with red and driving her to her knees.

The man who’d injected her continued backwards, slipping wordlessly out the door and slamming it shut behind himself.

Screaming in pain she lunged at the door, leaving steaming streaks of red on it as she slid to the floor.

Taking a deep breath, feeling her ribcage unfold, expanding to accommodate new organs swelling into being, she rose to her feet. The changes rippled up her neck, muscles twisting and reforming along her trachea, pulling her lower jaw apart into powerful, insectile mandibles. Along the inner edge her teeth lengthened, curving to the point where they resembled tusks.

It hurt.

Everything hurt.

Struggling to breathe, she pawed at the door, trying to push it open with hands that were little more than thick, blunt claws. Her back hunched, skin splitting over a dull, rust colored carapace.

Her throat burned, she couldn’t breathe, she could barely see.

The new organs in her chest convulsed and, with a feeling not dissimilar to vomiting, she sprayed a gout of searing fluid from her mouth. Most of it hit the door, hissing and popping as it began to melt the metal.

Caustic slime still dripping from her mouth Jill rushed the corroding door, bulling through it and into the hall. She could see the man who’d done this to her at the end of it, fleeing.

She charged.

How much ground she covered with each stride, how quickly she caught up with him and how light he felt when she grabbed him with her claws and slammed him to the ground was proof of how much larger she was, how much stronger.

Caught up in the frenzy of pain and violence, the fact that his blood felt cold, dulling the burning within when it splashed across her chest and face, she never noticed the guards sneaking up on her, never felt the needles as they fired dart after dart into her until she finally fell to the floor, the haze of red fading to gray and then black as she passed out.

-o0o-

The floor was cold beneath her skin, soothing. She couldn’t remember what had happened, other than a red haze and that laying on cool concrete was a blissful relief.

What had happened to her?

She ached everywhere, like she’d been working out too hard or just gotten through one hell of a mission. Opening her eyes she stared at her hands.

Human hands, five nimble fingers, not claws.

Why had she expected claws?

Why did her throat feel raw, her chest ache?

There was blood on her hands, dried to a red crust.

Her own?

She didn’t think so, even though deep cuts covered her hands and arms.

They weren’t bleeding, even though they looked wet inside.

She flexed her fingers, muscle twitched inside the slit.

A yellow eye gleamed in the crevices.

She’d watched herself, felt herself come apart.

Bits and pieces were coming back to her.

The voice. The injection. The pain. What followed.

Gasping she sat up, looked at her self.

She was naked, covered in blood, fissures running across her body like a statue made of driftwood.

She was human again, or at least she looked human, mostly human.

And she was covered in blood.

It wasn’t her own.

She’d killed a man, killed him and…

She could taste blood.

It wasn’t her own.

 

 


	7. Mia Winters

She had to do it. There was no other choice.

That was what she had to keep telling herself.

She owed Ethan this much at least. That was why she was working for another bioresearch company, a little startup in Greece. It was a lovely place, the kind of place she might take Ethan on vacation to, to celebrate when it was all over.

Ever since Ethan had come to rescue her she’d been wracked by guilt. It was all her fault, everything was her fault, but this was her way of making things right, for him at least.

Before it all she’d been inoculated, had a resistance to the Mutamycete and Eveline had been trying to keep her alive, sane for the most part, so she’d had an advantage, the chance to build up a tolerance. Ethan on the other hand, they hadn’t been able to cure him like they had her. He was stuck in quarantine, would be until he either recovered or succumbed to the infection lingering on in his blood. They were optimistic about a cute, but she had her doubts.

That was why she was here, why she’d brought a sample of the Mutamycete in the form of a vial of Ethan’s blood, when they asked. They said they were working on a vaccine, but she knew that they were lying, still, what use was a virus without a treatment? That was what she was banking on. She’d stick with them, help out as best as she was able and her payment would be that Ethan received the treatment, that was why she was doing it.

Lately her assignment had been simple enough, helping take care of what she’d come to think of as the menagerie, a collection of B.O.W.s housed in cells in the facility’s basement, as well as the hulking monstrosity that was kept in a lab that had been converted to hold it. She’d gotten used to it, tried not to think about how they’d once been human, or at least three of them had, she wasn’t so sure about the seemingly boneless swimming thing or the one with lashing barbed tails. There was nothing recognizable as human about either of them, the others though, especially the C-virus mutant, were troubling. Not the unmistakable Jill Valentine, but the thing she’d learned was called a Lepotica, that one was a problem. It knew the game it she was playing and could play it itself. The thing tried to make conversation with her, casual, but with leading questions. It didn’t want sympathy, it didn’t want pity, though it tried for both. Mostly though it tried to get her to talk, to at least pass messages to the others.

She’d refused, though in a gesture of good will, she’d told it about the hulking thing it the lab, trapped because it was too large to fit through the door or even stand upright.

Today her task was simple, go down in full biosafety gear and hose down a cell for a new addition that would be showing up soon. The cell needed to be clean to avoid cross contamination, which made her wonder what, if anything had been held in there previously.

She swiped her keycard, waited for the light to turn green and the glass to slide away. Another swipe and there was a click that signaled the door through the bars was open.

At least she didn’t have to feed the B.O.W.s or clean their cells. The Lepotica was getting chatty again, trying to act friendly and Jill Valentine continued to frighten her. The BSAA agent was the most human looking of them, but her constant expression of quiet resignation was horrific, reminding her of what Ethan had to be going through.

Ethan, she was doing it for Ethan.

She was watching, compliant as terrible things happened, but it was all for Ethan, so that meant that what she was doing wasn’t all terrible.

It was for a good reason and that was what mattered.

Because intent had to matter.

Otherwise…

Mop and hose in hand, she washed down the cell, carefully scrubbing every surface. She was acting as a glorified janitor, but she didn’t care, better than getting stuck taking care of feeding the B.O.W.s like the workers who had just showed up.

She listened to them walk by without turning around.

They’d deal with Valentine first because she was the easiest. Most of the time she’d cringe away, staying to the back of her cell like she was afraid of being hurt. That wasn’t the case of course, Valentine was easy to read and when she was in a bad mood you could tell right away. Those days she didn’t look human at all. If you looked into her cell and saw an enormous, fanged, bug thing you knew to leave her alone. The bars of her cell were badly corroded, the glass pitted from her repeated escape attempts.

Valentine was in a good mood today, Mia could hear her whimpering, as the glass door to her cell slid back probably huddled in a corner. If she’d been given new bedding she’d probably have it wrapped around her to preserve either modesty or dignity. Valentine was tougher than she seemed though, she wasn’t afraid of her captors, she was terrified of herself, what she could do. It was something Mia could understand, the woman had spent her whole life fighting B.O.W.s and to have ended up as one, it was impressive that she was managing to hold herself together so well.

Focused on cleaning, Mia didn’t notice one of the other workers come up to the cell she was in until she heard the door click shut. By the time she turned around the glass was already sliding back into place.

“What’s going on? Do you think this is a joke?” she asked uselessly, knowing that the glass was designed to dampen sound.

The worker hurried away, as did the others, they’d finished their tasks and were rushing to get out of the cell block, leaving her behind.

It had been deliberate, and she knew why. Her employer had mentioned tying up loose ends the other day, Mia just hadn’t figured that she’d be one of them. So she was trapped until something happened. She might be able to talk her way out of things though, after all if she begged for mercy on Ethan’s behalf they might decide that he was leverage enough to use against her, that she’d be quiet for his sake.

All she had to do was wait until the next day when the workers came back down to the menagerie.

Her biosafety suit was getting hot and uncomfortable, but she wasn’t going to take it off. Even though she knew the cell was clean, that she’d just cleaned it herself, it felt wrong to expose herself to anything, real or imagined, in a place full of B.O.W.s.

Just the thought was enough to make her feel feverish, achy.

The power of suggestion was remarkable that way.

She itched inside the suit, but that wasn’t an issue. The suits were uncomfortable after all.

She wiggled and rubbed at her arms, the itching would pass in time, she just needed to relax and wait it out.

It didn’t, getting so bad that it was almost painful. She had to scratch and when she did she was certain that she felt something moving beneath the suit.

A hallucination, she still had those from time to time, thanks to Eveline, but she was getting better, she hardly ever had them anymore. It was nerves that was making it happen, make it feel like her skin was twitching, writhing. If she looked down she could almost see it, things rolling and writhing beneath the arms of her suit.

Waiting it out wasn’t working.

If anything it was getting worse.

The hallucinations brought with them a feeling of claustrophobia, like her suit was getting too tight.

Worrying about nothing wasn’t going to do her any good, which settled the matter.

She took off her mask and as she did so she noticed something odd. The filters looked like they’d been tampered with. That might have been the problem, she hadn’t put them on correctly when she’d last replaced them and had been breathing stale air the whole time. She took one off to fix the problem and saw that the white fiber mesh lining the interior was tinged pink. She’d been breathing in something and she had no clue what.

Suddenly the itching became urgent. She had to see and reassure herself.

Stripping out of the suit in record time she saw muscles bulging beneath her skin, dark veins twitching and pulsing. She stared at her arms, frozen with fear.

This wasn’t like her normal hallucinations.

What had she been exposed to?

She stared at the glass wall of her cell, as though the answer lay beyond it.

The blobby, armored aquatic thing was in the cell across from hers. It was ignoring its meal in favor of watching her. In the next cell over from it Jill Valentine was watching, yellow eyes wide with an unreadable emotion.

Being stared at by B.O.W.s as…

She’d been told to prep the cell for a new specimen.

She was the new specimen.

Which of them would she end up like?

Or would she turn into something new?

More dark shapes were visible beneath her skin, writhing and rolling over each other, threatening to burst through. She could feel her skin stretching to the breaking point and past it. Slick, dark tendrils rose up, flowed out over her arms.

Her first thought was Mutamycete, that she hadn’t actually been cured, but this was something different.

Her employer, the strange, youthful voice over the computer had said mentioned that her latest acquisition, not the Mutamycete, but something else, was a tribute. She didn’t have much hope for it, but she’d wanted to see if she could refine it into something useable as a memorial of sorts, that she’d worked with it in the past, hoping to understand Albert’s fascination with it. Mia had thought it was unnerving to hear someone so seemingly young talk about Wesker like that, as though she knew him intimately, but she’d ignored it.

Now it was coming back to her, a new acquisition, a tribute to Wesker. It had to be Uroboros.

She’d been infected with Uroboros.

The tendrils squirmed up and down her arms, across her chest, weaving in and out of her skin.

Soon they’d pull her apart and she’d collapse into a writhing pile.

Except she didn’t.

Eventually the itching subsided and with it the movement of the tendrils slowed.

Across the hall Jill and the swimming thing had recoiled in horror. Steaming slime dripped from Jill’s mouth as she wretched violently, her body rippling and pulling itself apart as she transformed into a more monstrous state in response to what she’d seen.

Mia slumped to the floor and began to sob, tentacles writing in agitation.

Somehow seeing that response from a B.O.W., a monster, drove home what had happened to her, what she’d done.

Even if it was for Ethan, what she’d been a part of hadn’t been justified.

She was a monster now as well and she deserved it.


	8. Sherry Birkin

Sherry’s mind hadn’t been on the mission, which was the start of the problem. Instead she’d been thinking about how she gotten a call from Jake earlier that day, wondering if she’d be able to hook up some time in the next week or so. All she had to do was name the place and he’d be there. It had been months since she’d last seen him, so it was understandable that she’d been excited for the chance. Once the mission was over she’d call him immediately and it was an easy mission, or at least it was supposed to have been.

She and Helena were working for the DSO, responding to a request for help from the Greek government. It seemed that a previously defunct lab had become operational again and they lacked the means of dealing with it. Apparently it was something they wanted dealt with in secrecy so they hadn’t contacted the BSAA. She and Helena had been sent in and Leon was supposed to follow up several hours later, once things were fully sorted out with the local government. It was yet another thing on her mind other than the mission. She admired Leon so much and had desperately wanted to impress him.

Instead they’d walked straight into a trap before they even made it into the building. Neither of them had seen the sniper in the tall grass. There wasn’t even a warning before Sherry felt a burst of pain in her chest and fell to the ground unable to breathe. She’d been shot, it was a feeling she knew well enough, but not one she’d ever get used to.

On the bright side it was a through and through wound, which would make it easy enough for her body to heal, not that she could explain it to Helena when she could hardly breathe for coughing up blood.

Dizzy from blood loss and lack of oxygen she hadn’t even noticed they were surrounded until one of the masked men in their black uniforms forced Helena to her feet at gunpoint.

Two of them had picked her up and carried her when she proved unable to stand.

They were brought into the building, stripped of their gear and taken down into the basement.

The men dragged her into a cell and held her down while a third, came at her with a needle. She kicked feebly, still not recovered enough to actually try and put up much of a fight. The man with the needle easily avoided her efforts and sank it deep into the muscle of her thigh.

Once that was done the two men holding her tossed her to the back of the cell and bolted for the door.

Sherry lay there, focusing on her heart beat and breathing, confident that whatever she’d been injected with, the dormant G-virus would protect her from it. Soon enough she’d be healed and then she’d be able to get up and start getting ready to escape, because Leon was on his way and would know something was wrong when he didn’t hear from either of them. Leon would be ready and come to her rescue, just like he and Claire had when she was little.

It was embarrassing that he’d be rescuing her again now that she was grown, but it couldn’t be avoided. What mattered was that he was coming and she’d be safe. Something moved outside of her cell.

A young woman in a simple, but fashionable blouse and pair of slacks.

Natalia Korda, Barry Burton’s adopted daughter.

Sherry sat bolt upright.

“What are you doing here?” the words came out as a croak, her chest still not fully healed, “Hurry and hide before they find you!”

They’d talked a few times in the past. Being infected with the T-Phobos virus, Natalia had been fascinated about Sherry’s own latent infection. They were kind of alike in that way, but for the life of her Sherry couldn’t figure out how Natalia had ended up in the same lab. Hadn’t Barry and his family been through enough lately?

“Find me?” Natalia laughed, “Oh, that’s not a problem at all.”

“What do you mean?” Sherry didn’t know how she could sound so confident, unless Leon had already arrived and let her out, but if that was the case why hadn’t he freed her as well? Had he sent Natalia to do it for him while he took care of something else?

“It’s not important,” Natalia smiled sweetly, “You know I was always fascinated by that G-virus of yours.”

“This isn’t really the time,” Sherry smiled nervously, “Either hide or get me out.”

“There’s plenty of time, for me at least,” Natalia shrugged, “I’ve been wondering, does it really make you immune to everything or does it simply counteract the deleterious effects of anything your exposed to. It did a remarkable job of healing that gunshot would. Any human would have been killed instantly, but you’re still alive. So I want to find out, are you like Albert and myself, or are you something different and unique?”

“What? What are you talking about?” It was too much for her to parse, none of what she was hearing made any sense.

“I had them inject you with the T-virus, just to see what would happen. I’m curious to see if your body integrates it like it has the G-virus or if the G-virus simply cancels it out,” Natalia leaned in closer, “So tell me, how do you feel?”

Sherry coughed, bringing up the last of the blood from the injury to her chest. She spat it in the floor and let what she’d just heard sank in.

“Why?”

“Because I can and because it’s something that needs to be done. You don’t realize it, given what you are, but humanity is doomed, sentenced to death by its own frailty. I’m experimenting with different viruses in an attempt to find one that’s perfect. Considering you, I’d initially thought it would be the G-virus, but that wasn’t the case. Even my improved strain failed to recreate your physical stability. It was better than what happened to your father, but nowhere near the level of refinement I was looking for,” she tilted her head towards something across the hall and Sherry followed the motion.

A G-virus mutant, more sleek and agile looking than what her father had become, but still instantly and terrifyingly recognizable. Without thinking, Sherry scrambled to the back of her cell, desperate to get as far from the thing as possible. It couldn’t get to her, but the sight of it was enough to bring back memories she’d tried so hard to forget

There’d been more that she’d wanted to say, but the sight of the B.O.W. across the hall had driven it all from her mind. For the longest time all she could do was stare, and the thing was staring back at her, panting and pacing, desperate to get to her and…

No!

She shook her head violently to clear away the thought. That thing wasn’t…wasn’t her father. It had no more reason to seek her out than it would anyone else, but it was still staring straight at her.

Her leg itched where she’d been injected and she scratched it.

The fabric was wet beneath her fingers. When she looked down she saw that it was stained dark with blood.

Natalia made a small noise of disappointment and stepped back. She put her hand on something on the wall and a glass panned slid in front of the cell.

She walked away without a second glance.

Sherry stared down at the growing stain.

What was happening to her?

Unlike any other injury she’d received, it was painless, just itchy like it had already started to heal, but it hadn’t because it was still bleeding, or more weeping really, under closer examination it was clear that it wasn’t blood, at least not all of it.

The spreading damp made the fabric cling uncomfortably to her leg.

No, she realized as she shifted position to try and alleviate the discomfort, it wasn’t the moisture, or at least not entirely. Her clothing was getting tighter, which was happening because she was growing.

It was especially noticeable around her hands and wrists, the joints looking swollen as bones shifted and thickened. More than bone, muscle was growing as well. She’d always been deceptively strong for her size, but now it showed and it went beyond that. She was starting to look like a female bodybuilder.

And it wasn’t just the size of her muscles that was increasing, she was growing in general, but not uniformly so. The changes were most severe around her arms and hands. Her fingers continued to thicken, her nails growing into curving, yellow claws. Little welts appeared on her arms, small fissures spreading across her skin, clear fluid seeping from them.

She felt her shirt tear as her chest and shoulders grew too broad for it to contain. The wet tearing sound that followed was her skin splitting across her chest and back. She could see raw, red muscle beneath and smell the musty scent of decay.

The T-virus was rotting her skin, killing the nerves, which was why what was happening was painless and as fast as it worked, the G-virus was faster, repairing the damage and more as it won the frantic regenerative race.

Clenching her teeth, and in the process discovering that they’d grown into fangs so large that she couldn’t close her mouth, she let out a moan of fear and disgust. The skin of her face split painlessly, fluid mixing with the drool dripping from her fangs and her the bones of her jaw grew to accommodate them, projecting out into a short, blunt muzzle.

It didn’t hurt, but it itched horribly as her skin rotted and split and regrew only for the process to start all over again.

She clawed at herself, tearing away the tattered remains of her clothing as well as several large chunks of skin.

It helped, not much, but it helped. At least with her clothing gone there wasn’t anything holding the rot stuck against the skin regrowing beneath it.

And the rot itself seemed to be slowing down. There were still open sores and plenty of places where she could see exposed muscle, but what skin there was didn’t seem to be falling off anymore.

So maybe it would get better. Maybe it would heal, but it didn’t seem likely that it would be more than her skin. She had the sickening feeling that everything else was there to stay.

Wiping away the strands of lank hair plastered to her brow by the fluid weeping from open sores, she tried to think of what to do.

Leon would be there soon, but it wasn’t like he could rescue her from this.

Across the hall the G-virus B.O.W. shook its head and slumped to the floor.

Apparently now she was less interesting to it, not that she could blame it. In her experience B.O.W.s rarely attacked each other.


	9. Helena Harper

Helena had been so shocked by what had happened to Sherry, not just that she’d been shot, but that she’d somehow survived the injury despite the enormous exit wound, that she hadn’t been able to react in time when they found themselves captured. She hadn’t even thought to fight as they were brought to the lab.

Having a group of goons in black aiming their guns at her hadn’t helped inspire her to action, but she at least should have put up a fight when one of them grabbed her face and forced an inhaler of some kind into her mouth. They’d blasted her with bitter tasting something that had chilled her lungs and left her choking as they threw her into a cell.

She coughed so hard it hurt to breathe and kept at it until she was coughing up blood.

Her skin grew pale and clammy, her fingers gray from lack of oxygen and still she kept coughing.

Then the blood turned black.

Or not the blood itself, there was something in the blood that was black.

Strands of something fibrous that grew with a life of their own, black spots spreading beyond the blood streaked sputum.

There was something growing inside her.

The coughing eventually eased up, though her ribs ached horribly. Her skin remained deathly pale, whatever was filling her lungs preventing her from getting enough oxygen and leaving her feeling light headed, giddy almost.

It was hard to focus, her thoughts going in random directions.

Sherry laying there bleeding, the men with guns surrounding them.

She should have fought. So what if she’d gotten shot? Sherry had survived it.

But Sherry wasn’t human, she reminded herself.

Which might have been the point, if she’d been killed she wouldn’t been here, full of whatever it was that they’d made her inhale.

So she’d be better off dead.

Maybe she should kill herself.

She could hang herself from the bars of her cell, that would work.

She’d already started taking off her belt, when she realized what she was doing.

Bad as the situation seemed, she didn’t want to die, there might be a cure. Besides, Leon would be getting there soon, wouldn’t he?

And Sherry was somewhere in the building, on the same floor as she was. If she killed herself she wouldn’t be able to do any good at all.

So she had to stay alive, maybe kill the assholes who’d captured them.

Yes, that felt like a good idea.

She was pissed off enough to do it, even without her gun.

She’d kill them with her bare hands, her teeth, her…

She shook her head.

Those thoughts weren’t like her at all. Whatever she’d been infected with was doing things to her mind, but as long as she was aware of it she could keep in under control and if she could keep it under control…

She started pacing the cell, hoping that keeping moving would help keep her mind clear. It helped, somewhat. At least avoiding the patches of stuff growing on the floor gave her something to think about, even if whatever it was had come from inside her.

Avoiding it was pointless when she was full of it.

To get it out she’d have to cut it out and she didn’t have a knife.

She did have her hands though, could she use those?

Her nails were longer than she remembered sharper too. Could she slice open her own chest, pull her ribs apart and scrape out the black?

The idea was fascinating to her with how repulsive it was.

She pulled open her shirt, sending buttons flying in all directions.

Tracing a claw-like nail down the center of her chest she looked at the shapes of her ribs, standing out in stark contrast beneath her skin.

Had they always been that prominent?

She chewed thoughtfully at her lip, fangs shredding it.

No, they hadn’t.

Spatters of black and crimson pattered down on her chest.

What was she doing?

She stopped, gingerly bringing her fingers to her face to feel the damage.

Instead she encountered fangs. She had a mouthful of razor sharp teeth.

That was good though, good for ripping out throats.

She coughed, bringing up more black, mingling with the blood dripping from her fangs.

Her own blood.

Would somebody else’s blood taste different?

She wanted to know.

No!

No, she didn’t want to know.

She had to hold on, stay focused until Leon arrived.

Then…

She didn’t know what, but something would happen then.

Wheezing, she sat down. Pacing was making her head spin, making the room spin and she needed to stay focused.

She rested her hands on her stomach, tried and failed to wipe away the black that was growing from her blood.

Her stomach hurt. She’d swallowed a lot of her own blood and a good bit of flesh too when she’d been chewing on her lip so it was no wonder she felt queasy. She took a deep breath, waited for it to pass.

At least she could breathe again.

She licked her lips, tasting the blood there.

She licked her lips, cutting her tongue on her fangs.

She was going to have to be careful.

She licked her lips.

Her lips.

They were pulled taunt across her fangs, but they were whole an unharmed. They didn’t even hurt.

All the pain was in her stomach.

It felt tight and swollen beneath her hands.

She’d swallowed a lot of her own blood and the black stuff grew in it, grew wild.

Her stomach was full of it.

Like puss in an abscess.

What would happen if she cut it open?

Would the black pour out and –

No, she had to stop thinking like that.

What was she infected with that it made her want to kill herself?

Except it wouldn’t kill her, she realized, she’d recover from the injury, but the blood would be full of the black stuff.

It was an infection vector, that had to be it. The compulsion towards self-harm was there because it would help whatever it was spread.

Knowing helped, made it easier to understand the thoughts at least.

The infection was in her brain, making her crazy, but she had to fight it.

Standing up she started pacing again, only to stop herself when she felt her thoughts growing frantic. She had to stay focused, figure out how bad her situation was.

She was trapped in a cell, blocked in by bars and glass, though the glass might not be such a bad thing considering the state she was in.

She wasn’t alone, Sherry might be somewhere nearby and across the hall there were other…things. She recognized the one as a Lepotica, though it was an unusually large one, the faintest suggestion of muscle beneath its flabby arms. Next to it was something that she couldn’t identify. The thing was staring at something on her side of the hall, not her or at least she didn’t think so. The final creature was one that she had mistaken for a human at first, but the woman, or thing that had been a woman, was wreathed in writhing tendrils. Her entire left arm was little more than a squirming mass and the half dozen or so that had burst from her right arm were wrapped around it, the longest ones slung over her shoulder to keep them out of the way. The woman was watching her with an expression of utter horror, but that wasn’t what caught Helena’s attention, it was the way the woman was dressed.

It was a biosafety suit, or at least the remains of one. She wasn’t wearing the mask and she’d torn the arms, probably to let the tentacles out, but it marked her as an employee of the place.

An accident? A betrayal?

Either way she knew something.

“What’s going on here?” Helena called out to her, wincing at the harsh croak that was her voice now.

The woman shook her head and pointed at the glass, silently mouthing something.

It took Helena a minute to figure out what it meant. The glass was soundproof. Just her luck that she wouldn’t be getting any answers.

Clenching and unclenching her fists she started pacing again, just a few laps to clear her head.

She punched the wall in frustration, her nails cutting into her palms.

Again and again, her knuckles splitting, smearing the wall with blood. She kept at it until she felt bones break.

The virus or whatever it was had gotten the better of her again.

Shaking her injured hands, sending droplets of blood flying, she took a deep, wheezing breath and waited.

She could feel shards of bone sliding back into place, growing and jostling with each other.

There were places where they’d broken through her skin and she could feel those bits being pushed up and out. When she moved her hands they clattered and scraped against each other.

Walking back across the cell she leaned against the bars and stared at her hands. They were covered in jagged shards of bone, thin and splintery.

She should probably pull them out, but that was too close to what the virus wanted her to do. So for the time being at least they were there to stay. Beyond the bars she watched as the Lepotica clawed at the air.

No, that wasn’t what it was doing, it was gesturing. Going by the pauses and its body language during them it was communicating with something across the hall from it. The thing next to it was getting involved in the discussion too, rearing up on its hind legs and using its clawed paws to hold it up against the bars of its cell so that it could motion with a smaller, almost human looking set of arms.

The woman with the tendrils didn’t seem to like the direction the conversation was going in, shaking her head again and again, then jumping back in response to something.

Helena watched as she shrugged, made a negative gesture and then stared directly at her and began gesturing.

They were trying to bring her into the conversation.

 


	10. Leon to the Rescue

In the end all it had taken was a simple bribe to get all of the red tape cleared up. The mission was instantly given the go-ahead once the funds went through. Afterwards it would likely mean a whole lot more bureaucratic wrangling, but that would be a mess that he wasn’t a part of.

By the time he made it to the compound Sherry and Helena had been missing for over two hours. There had been no radio contact at all, despite repeated attempts. That set off all sorts of warning bells and he approached the seemingly abandoned compound with far greater care than he normally would have, which proved to be a good thing.

A stray glint of light in the grass caught his eye, warning him of the sniper just in time.

The shot missed and he zigzagged forward to where he’d seen the light, shooting and hoping he got lucky.

He did, a patch of grass stood up, the sniper clutching at his injured arm. Another shot finished him off.

Leon didn’t know if the sniper had time to call in to whoever was waiting at the compound, but he decided that he was going to go in with the assumption that he had.

Guards were waiting for him, four of them, and he caught their attention, leading them on a chase around the outside of the building as he picked them off one by one. He kept expecting more to show up, but none did.

Wondering if maybe that had been the extent of the place’s security force he took a chance and went inside, nearly shooting a fleeing man in a lab coat who quite literally ran into him.

He relieved the man of several sets of keys and keycards. The scientist was also more than happy to give Leon information about the layout of the facility, four floors, two above ground, two below, the number of researchers, seventeen, counting the boss, who was there today, the number of guards, six, and the location of Helena and Sherry, the second basement, in return for being allowed to live. Leon hadn’t planned on shooting the man anyway, so it worked out for both of them.

Since he’d been cooperative Leon locked him in a supply closet and headed down to rescue Sherry and Helena.

He saw Helena immediately, though he nearly didn’t recognize her at first.

She was standing in a cell, dejectedly leaning against the bars, hair hanging over her face. Her arms were gaunt, as though somehow in the few hours she’d been missing she’d been afflicted by some horrible wasting illness. When she lifted her head he nearly stumbled.

Her face was streaked with oily, black slime. Thick strands of drool, also black, trailed down from between long, fangs.

She took one look at him and staggered to the back of her cell. There she sat, curled up in the corner, hiding her face with her arms.

In the cell across from hers there was a woman who was gesturing frantically to the side, towards the lock to her cell was.

As soon as they made eye contact she dropped to her knees, silently begging. The glass, he realized, muffled her pleas. He looked back at Helena, who had looked up. Looking past him she pointed at the woman and nodded frantically.

The message was clear, let her out.

Leon did as told, hesitating as the glass slid back and he noticed for the first time the slithering black tendrils sliding across the woman’s body.

“What are you waiting for?” she grabbed onto the bars, tendrils coiling around them, “We’ve got to get out.”

“You…” he stared at the tendrils, “And Helena, you’re both…”

“Not with the same thing,” the woman said quickly, “You can’t let her out. The Mutamycete is too dangerous. She can’t control it and –”

Tendrils wrapped around his legs, pulling him off his feet and over to the bars.

He reached for his gun, but more tendrils wrapped around his wrists, trapping his hands. He expected the infected woman to try and kill him, but instead she grabbed the keycard, used her tendrils to slide it through the lock and free herself before tossing him down the hall.

“Sorry.”

Leon didn’t know if her apology was to him, or to Helena, who she was looking at.

Then she hurried to a cell farther down the hall and unlocked it.

A frantic looking, heavily scarred woman burst out before the bars could even finish opening.

Her would be rescuer was barely able to get out of the way in time to avoid the wild punch aimed at her.

Impossible as it was, Leon recognized her right away. Missing once again and presumed dead, it was Jill Valentine.

“Jill!”

She turned to look at him, yellow eyes widening as her expression went from rage to shock as though a switch had been flipped.

“Leon?” She blinked and rubber her eyes, “It’s really you! We’ve got to…”

She trailed off, staring at something in the cell farther down the hall, next to hers.

“Jill, what’s wrong?” Like Helena and the other woman, she was obviously infected with something, and he didn’t want to get any closer until he knew what.

“They…” she stared at him, tears steaming as they fell down her face, hinting at what she was infected with, the C-virus, just like with Simmons. Now he could even see the similarities. Jill leaned against the bars of the cell and stared into it, “Oh, Sheva. I’m so sorry.”

“Her cell opens from the top,” the woman who’d let Jill out said, “You can get her after we let the others out.”

Having said that she opened another of the cells.

Something straight out of his nightmares of Raccoon City leapt out.

The wide, rolling eyes that dotted its muscular, bruise colored body stared at him, the resemblance uncanny.

It wasn’t William Birkin, but it was clearly some form of G-virus mutant.

The B.O.W. turned its head towards Jill and growled something. The noise had a questioning tone to it.

The woman who’d let it out shook her head, “Someone named Leon.”

It staggered back.

“You know him?”

It nodded, growled something almost like words, then shook its head, “Long strry.”

When the woman opened the next cell, the hulking, rotten looking thing inside leapt back, letting out a growl that sounded more fearful than hostile.

The G-virus B.O.W. crept forward, “S’okay, m’not going hrrt yoo.”

The thing in the cell let out a high pitched whine in response.

“She’s afraid of you,” the infected woman sounded amused.

The B.O.W.’s tails lashed angrily through the air, then abruptly it froze and slunk back away from the cell. It turned to face him, eyes half closed, “Leeon, yoo try. Shee rr-rr-reg…shee know yoo.”

No, that couldn’t mean what it sounded like.

“Leon?” the thing in the cell rasped hopefully, taking a nervous step forward, never taking its eyes off of the G-virus B.O.W., “You’re alright?”

“Yeah,” he swallowed back disgust as the massive, faintly simian looking thing nervously shuffled forward, “You?”

A remarkably stupid question, but it was all he could manage.

The thing, Sherry, looked down at itself and shook its head, “I messed up, bad.”

During this time the woman wasn’t idle and released the last of the BO.W.s that she seemed to have decided that she could safely release.

A Lepotica stepped out of its cell and Leon backed away, anticipating the cloud of noxious, C-virus laden fumes it would release.

The thing stared at him, black eyes glistening in the puffy, sagging flesh of its face like seeds pressed into dough. It blinked several times, wiped a gnarled, clawed hand across its face and shook its head, “Don’t worry, I can control it.”

The pores dotting its bloated body twitched.

It turned and started walking away from them.

Jill glared at it, yellow eyes narrowing to shimmering slits, “Where are you going?”

Even as a B.O.W. herself she wasn’t ready to trust one.

The Lepotica didn’t turn around, “I’m going to find the woman who was down here when I first arrived. I’m not going to leave her behind.”

“You’re not going to be able to get it out,” the woman who had let it and the rest of them out warned.

It shrugged, continuing to walk away with a saunter that belied its bulk, “If that’s the case she’ll still be where you said she was and I can see for myself.”

Its voice, high, breathless hiss that it was, the way it walked were somehow familiar to Leon and he didn’t like it.

Leon didn’t get to ponder that for too long, Jill turned to him, “What’s the plan? You’ve finished clearing the place?”

He nodded, shock had apparently rendered him mute.

“Good,” Jill smiled bitterly, “Then I won’t have to worry about accidentally hurting anyone. You contact…” she trailed off, trying to figure out who was to be contacted in a situation like this before addressing the other former captives, “The BSAA, let them know what’s going on. I’m going to go up with Leon and check on Sheva and the rest of you can wait here.”

“No, not with…” Sherry growled anxiously, “Not with…”

She’d continued to move away from the G-virus B.O.W. and shockingly it had backed away from her as well.

“The person running this is still here,” Leon spoke, finally having found his voice, “We need to find them.”

He’d meant himself and Sherry, as an excuse to get her away from the others, but it was Jill who responded first. Letting out an inhuman roar of rage, she charged down the hall, body shifting and warping as she did. By the time she reached the end of it and vanished up the stairs, she was on all fours and twice the size that she’d been.

“She’ll either be in her office or the labs. You go there and help her,” the infected woman ordered, “I’m going to see about finding a biosafety suit that fits your friend Helena so we can get her out of here. You all probably aren’t going to want to be around for it. The Mutamycete makes people crazy. I…I know what she’s going through so I can probably figure out how she’ll react and maybe calm her down so she doesn’t hurt anyone, or herself. I’d rather not let her out, but you’re not going to leave without her and the last thing we need is an outbreak of that stuff because the BSAA doesn’t realize what it’s dealing with.”

The G-virus B.O.W. growled and walked over to her, forcing Leon and Sherry to step out of the way to stay clear of its tails, “Don’t trrst yoo.”

There was a dynamic at hand that Leon couldn’t understand.

The woman shrugged, “I don’t blame you. You can follow me to keep an eye on things if you want, but once I get her out keep back. Everything in that cell she’s in is a biohazard that’s going to need to be dealt with and you’re not going to fit into protective gear.”

The two of them walked off, leaving him alone in the hall with Sherry.

She looked at him, her animalistic, skull-like face expressionless. Her eyes, shadowed by a heavy brow were the same blue-gray as ever and frightened, “That…”

She trailed off, staring down the hall where the others had vanished and scratched absentmindedly at a patch of necrotic flesh on her arm. It came away under her claws, revealing raw muscle beneath.

“We should probably find Jill,” Leon said, more to fill the silence than as an actual suggestion.

Sherry nodded.

Following her was easy, her claws had left gouges in the floor and in places some sort of caustic goo had left sizzling patched on the floor and walls. After they found the scientist, or what was left of him, following Jill’s path because even easier, just a matter of following the bloody footprints she’d left behind.

They found her charging a massive, vault looking door, again and again she slammed into it, spraying gouts of sizzling acid onto it. Despite her assault it held fast.

“We’ll need a keycard to get in, if we can get in at all.”

Talking had been a mistake. Jill swing her head in his direction. If he hadn’t known it was her she would have been unrecognizable. There was nothing human left to her features. The top of her head was almost crested like a boar’s, the high ridge of bone there to accommodate the muscles necessary to support bladelike mandibles as long as his arms, framing a mouth full of teeth as long and sharp as knives. Above the fangs a cluster of yellow eyes glistened.

Jill stared at him, pawing the ground like an animal about to charge.

He aimed his gun, knowing full well that it would be useless against something like her.

She her eyes locked on the gun.

There was enough left to her mind to recognize the weapon, but would it make her back off or only serve to further enrage her?

Mandibles opened and closed, teeth grinding against each other.

Sherry stepped to the side, moving so that he was between her and Jill.

He was trapped between B.O.W.s and both of them were women he knew.

There was a joke somewhere in that, but damnit if he couldn’t figure out a witty comment to make about the situation.

Jill shook her head violently, sending sizzling slime flying in all directions.

“Keycard…”

So there was something left to her.

Feeling more optimistic about his chances of surviving, Leon nodded, “Then we can get in and capture whoever’s inside.”

Jill let out a horrible grating hum that it took Leon several seconds to recognize as laughter.

He didn’t know what was so funny, but at least she wasn’t going to attack him. Probably.

“Sherry, find the woman who let you out and get the keys from her, I’ll…” he stared at Jill, “I’ll stay up here with Jill to keep an eye on things in case whoever’s in there tried to get out.”

Sherry looked at him, looked at Jill, “Alright.”

She didn’t sound terribly thrilled with the situation, but she took off down the hall at a jog, leaving him alone with a B.O.W.

As opposed to with two B.O.W.s he realized, but Sherry at least was in control of herself as far as he could tell.

Jill’s laughter trailed off to a soft buzz and then stopped entirely. When she spoke her words were remarkably clear.

“When the BSAA gets here… don’t tell them,” she scraped her claws across the floor, tracing meaningless, spiraling patterns, “Don’t let them know it’s me. I don’t want Chris to know that I…that this…”

She gestured at nothing in particular, but Leon understood. She’d become more or less the antithesis of what her organization stood for and if they decided that she needed to be eliminated it would be easier for all parties involved if they didn’t know who she was.

Keys jangled loudly.

From the opposite direction that Sherry had gone in.

Leon and Jill acted as one, looking in the direction of the sound.

The Lepotica was sauntering down the hall, looking confident, of all things, despite having a gun aimed at and a B.O.W. ready to charge it.

“Leon, Jill,” it titled its head slightly in a careless greeting as it held up a set of keys.

Again, there was something so familiar about the thing that it was maddening.

“Did you…” Leon trailed off, trying to figure out what it was, other than the obvious, that made the B.O.W. so unnerving.

“Yes, Moira’s fine, worried about her family and upset about being trapped, but otherwise she’s in more or less the same shape as the rest of us. She is trapped though, so we’re not going to be able to just go to the main office and see if this place has been setup to self-destruct,” it gave another of its little shrugs, and tossed the keys to him, “I ran into one of the researchers along the way, he had those on him, but he didn’t need them.”

Jill growled.

“Don’t worry,” the Lepotica laughed, “I didn’t kill him, there was no need to. I’ve always been persuasive.”

It looked past her to him.

“Keys,” Jill reminded, then backed away from the door to let him by.

He had to be careful to avoid the splatters of acid on the floors and walls, but the locking mechanism was undamaged and it only took a moment of fumbling to find the right key to open the door.

The minute it opened someone tried to run out past him, shoving him aside so hard that he nearly lost his balance and fell into the caustic mess on the floor.

While he was still struggling to stay on his feet Jill charged, slamming into whoever it was, smashing them into the wall. Leon got a good look at them and was shocked to see that they were a young woman, pretty in a plain sort of way and not at all what he’d expected.

Somehow, despite being impaled and pinned to the wall they were still alive.

Steam rose up from Jill’s face and back, the contents of a canister that the woman had been holding that was now pinned against her chest, held there by the same curving mandible that was impaled through her stomach.

Leon backed away. He didn’t know what the liquid currently evaporating from the heat of Jill’s body was, but it couldn’t be anything good.

“You shortsighted idiot!” the woman gasped in rage and pain, “That was a culture of the unmodified Progenitor virus. Using what I’d learned from you and the others I was going to refine it into humanity’s salvation! Sickness, death, every human weakness would have been gone, but you refused to understand and in your blindness you’ve doomed humanity to an existence of weakness, the slow decay of senescence and then death!”

Jill twisted her head, trying to pull herself free.

“You think you’re saving humanity, but you’re not!” the woman continued to rant as she shoved at Jill, trying to push her away to free herself, “Because of you everyone is going to die, everyone you love, everyone you’ve ever cared about will slowly age and die and you won’t be able to stop any of it. You’ll live on, perfect and immortal and adaptable thanks to the viruses infecting you, but everyone else will die!”

“That’s part of being human,” Leon interrupted when he realized that she wasn’t talking about immediate death due to whatever virus was in the canister, but the eventuality that everyone faced, “Death is part of life and even if a person dies their legacy can live on in the good they’ve done, the people who remember them and are inspired them.”

The woman glared at him, her eyes burning with hatred, “I’ll save you, whether you want it or not. Once I get these test subjects back where they belong I can resume my work and you’ll be the first to receive my gift to humanity. You might not like it at first, but you’ll have forever to realize that I’m right and then you’ll thank me. I will have killed death and become humanity’s savior!”

Screaming she grabbed Jill’s mandibles and shoved with all her might.

To Leon’s surprise she actually succeeded in pushing the insectile B.O.W. away. Even more surprising was that she remained standing, blood flowing from her stomach, the liquid from the canister dripping down into the gaping wound.

As he watched the bleeding stopped, flesh knitting itself back together, but it didn’t stop there. Cysts rose up, burst and reformed as the woman’s flesh overgrew itself. The changes spread, radiating out from the wound.

“You!” she lunged forward at Jill, who tossed her aside with a flick of her head and a spray of acid.

She fell in a sizzling heap on the floor, then rose to her feet, her body regenerating as fast as the acid could eat away at it, then overtaking the acid.

For a moment she was little more than a rippling, human shaped mass of pulsing tumors, then they began to burst.

Some split to reveal mouths full of teeth and jagged fangs, there were eyes in others and some even had faces, partially or fully formed. Tentacles lashed out from lumpy, ever changing flesh. Arms lengthened and split, fingers twisted into claws.

The woman lurched towards Jill, grabbing her with tentacles, slashing her with wickedly sharp talons.

All the while she continued her rant, though it had degenerated along with the rest of her, little more than a cacophony about life and death, disease and immortality as each mouth spoke a different word, laughed, screamed or choked on fangs and tongues that stretched into tentacles. The thing was a disgusting, oozing mess and it was stronger than Jill.

Leon felt a hand on his shoulder.

Whirling around he found himself face to face with the Lepotica.

“Let’s get out of here Leon, there’s nothing you can do to –”

Sound advice, but not anything he was going to follow, Jill was a friend and fellow Raccoon City survivor and there was no way he was going to abandon her to that thing.

He fired round after round into it, only stopping to reload, but it didn’t seem to do anything. Every gunshot wound closed or opened into a mouth, an eye.

The thing wrapped tentacles around Jill’s neck and as fast as she could claw them away, bite them off, scald them with acid, more took their place. Slowly she was losing to the insane, ever-changing thing.

Down to his last shot Leon hesitated, wondering if there was anything he could to make it count.

“Wah th’hell?”

At the same time something frantically growled his name.

Sherry and the G-virus B.O.W. had arrived.

“Jll!” the G-virus B.O.W. leapt down the hall, clearing most of the distance between them in that single effort. Another pounce and it was on the thing, digging in with three sets of clawed limbs and stabbing it over and over again with its barbed tails.

Thanks to its efforts Jill was able to break free, only to resume tearing into the thing with her mandibles and tusks.

Sherry hung back, looking first at the fight and then at her hands.

Growling to herself she joined the fray.

The thing might have been stronger than any of them alone, together they had a chance.

Leon turned to the Lepotica, which had continued to hang back, “Are you going to help?”

It looked back at him, fanged mouth dropping open in what must had been its version of a grin, “What do you expect me to do?”

It had a point. Compared to the others it was probably the least effective in combat against another B.O.W.

He turned his attention back to the fight, watching as Sherry grabbed one of the things arms and a cluster of writhing tentacles and pulled them out of the way, allowing the G-virus B.O.W. an opening to rake its claws across the things body.

Mottled flesh split and ribs studded with almost human looking teeth shattered under the force of the impact. Leon got a clear view of the things lungs and hearts, plural. Jill spat acid on the exposed organs, but still the thing fought on, jerking its arm free of Sherry’s grasp and hitting her hard enough to knock her back several feet.

Dripping gore and acid, it lurched forward, catching the G-virus B.O.W.’s tails in a cluster of tentacles and twisting. The B.O.W. let out a shrill roar as it was pulled closer to the things central mass and a number of fang-ringed mouths. When Jill tried to charge it, it held the other B.O.W. between it and her. Jill hesitated, just for an instant, but it was long enough for the thing to sweep a tentacle across the floor and pull her off her feet.

Having managed to recover, Sherry rejoined the fray, her own claws nowhere near as long or as sharp as those of the others, but she still was able to do some damage. Aiming for where the things eyes were the densest she struck again and again, clawing and punching until the white dome of a skull was revealed.

Clusters of yellow eyes narrowed as Jill caught sight of the newly revealed potential weakness. She allowed herself to be pulled closer to the thing, managing another spray of acid, though this one was a weak trickle compared to what she’d been done previously. Apparently there was a limit of what she was capable of and she’d must reached it. The caustic liquid sizzled and ate away at the things flesh, further revealing the skull, which was shockingly human in size and appearance, buried within the things ever changing form.

Jill was about to follow through with her tusks when the thing picked her up and threw her and the G-virus B.O.W. down the hall.

Hoping that he was making the right decision Leon fired his last shot. The things skull, already weakened by the acid, collapsed. At the same time the G-virus B.O.W. had managed to twist in midair so that when it hit the wall it did so feet first and managed to rebound and throw itself at the thing, driving its claws deep into its brain.

Leon didn’t know if he or the B.O.W. delivered what ended up being the killing blow, all he knew was that the thing screamed from all its mouths at once, high and female, a chorus of perfectly human sounding agony.

It convulsed and then was still.

The fight was over.

Nodding approvingly the Lepotica went over and helped Jill to her feet. Exhausted and barely able to stand, Jill was shifting, slowly returning to a more human appearance, though the fissures running across her body remained deep and raw looking, with the occasional flash of yellow eyes peering out from within.

Sherry pulled herself free from limp tentacles and looked down at the slowly collapsing bulk of the thing.

“What was it?” She looked at Leon as though he would be able to answer.

“Is she dead?” Jill panted, her voice harsh and raw sounding, “We’ve stopped her?”

The G-virus B.O.W. dragged its claws across the floor, trying to scrape them clean as it growled something unintelligible.

The Lepotica seemed to get the general idea because it responded, “If what Moira said is true then I don’t know. If that was her –”

“It was,” Jill interrupted, “I accidentally broke a canister of Progenitor on her when I…”

“Moirra heer?” the G-virus B.O.W. growled.

“Then I don’t trust her to stay dead,” the Lepotica finished, ignoring the growled question.

“What now?” again Sherry was looking to him for answers when Leon had the least idea of what was going on of any of them.

“Whrr’s Moirra?” the G-virus B.O.W. repeated, “Shee heer?”

“Yes,” the Lepotica sounded curious, “We can check on the others after we’ve brought this down to the holding cells and locked it away.”

It tilted its head towards the dead thing.

Eyes closed, Jill nodded, “I’ve dealt with too many things that don’t stay dead to trust this one.”

That seemed to be the final word on matters.

With some trepidation Sherry and the G-virus B.O.W. dragged the oozing mess across the floor and down to the cells. Leon followed them, while the Lepotica took Jill in another direction to get to the room that Sheva’s cell opened into.

When they arrived in the cellblock the infected woman had already managed to find a biosafety suit for Helena and had finished decontaminating her cell, leaving no trace of the black substance. The two of them were sitting on the floor talking quietly to each other about how what Helena had been infected with could be treated. By the sounds of it the woman knew someplace where they were working on a cure and from the way Helena was nodding it seemed that the place sounded trustworthy to her.

The two of them watched as Sherry and the G-virus B.O.W. brought the dead thing into the cell that Helena had previously been in and locked it in. Down the hall Leon could see Sheva, the aquatic B.O.W. that Jill apparently knew, treading water at the top if its cell. Jill must have been up there with it because it didn’t respond to their arrival.

The Lepotica arrived not long afterwards, apparently not having trusted them to accomplish such a simple task. It looked into the cell, nodding in approval.

“Whrr –” the G-virus B.O.W. started to growl.

“Next floor up, opposite wing,” the Lepotica cut it off.

It ran down the hall, up the stairs and out of sight.

“Now that everything’s taken care of I’ll…” it trailed off, for the first time seeming uncertain. It looked at the others and then stared at Leon with watery eyes, “I’ll stay here and see this through to the end.”

Leon couldn’t help but wonder what it had originally planned on saying, or why it sounded so familiar. Not just sounded though, there was something about it that reminded him of…

He stared at the B.O.W.

It looked away.


	11. Aftermath

The rescue, if it could be called that, considering the condition of the women involved in the incident, was as much of a success as it could have been. After Leon had contacted his superiors the effort was organized and members of various agencies arrived to help with cleanup and removal.

The DSO was the first to respond, naturally. Both Helena and the Uroboros infected woman, Leon learned her name was Mia Winters, were picked up together. Apparently Mia hadn’t been lying, what Helena was infected with was treatable to some degree, curable in certain circumstances and Mia had some experience with it. It also helped that she was capable of keeping Helena calm and strong enough to hold her back when that failed. She’d been helpful enough, but there was something about her that rubbed him the wrong way and Leon was glad to see her go. Sherry had left with them, to keep an eye on the other two, much to Leon’s frustration. They all knew there wasn’t much that could be done for her and despite her condition he’d felt safer with her at his back. Being surrounded by B.O.W.s, even ones that were for all intents and purposes not a threat was unnerving and having Sherry around had helped. If anything had gone wrong she would have been an enormous help, but she’d left.

After Sherry was gone the Lepotica had sort of taken her place, though of all of them, it would be the least effective in a fight and was the most likely to end up hurting him by accident. It seemed to understand this, because when it wasn’t trying to help it kept its distance. Several times it approached him or he approached it and they nearly had a conversation where necessary questions were asked, but every time talk tapered off and they turned away from each other. They both knew and each knew what the other knew, but by avoiding talking about it helped make it so that it wasn’t real.

The BSAA arrived at the same time as the team of scientists sent in by the Greek government, there as much to retrieve Jill and Sheva as to figure out exactly what had been going on. The women being able to tell their stories of what happened helped them piece together Natalia’s mad plan, the infection and mutation of all of humanity into one or more new species. There was more to it than that, but Leon never put much stock into the ramblings of megalomaniacs.

Sheva’s condition made the rescue a complicated affair. She was still lucid and sane, but mutated to the point where her very biology acted against the rescue efforts. Lacking functional lungs, she apparently breathed through her skin and had to be kept in water, or at least wet, in order to do so.

Halfway through the effort Chris arrived, though no longer directly involved with the BSAA he’d been a member of the organization for long enough that he was allowed to join the effort as a consultant of sorts. Jill had been overjoyed to see him and he’d clearly been relieved, probably that she was still recognizable as human considering the condition of the others, though the reunion had been awkward. Once it was over and certain things had been discussed they were never out of each other’s sight. It turned out to be a good thing too, narrowly averting disaster when Chris had his first encounter with the G-virus B.O.W.

The B.O.W. was, or had been Claire, something no one had thought anything of until she and Chris were reunited. Maybe because she’d been a woman it had been assumed that the situation would be different, but it wasn’t. The moment she saw her brother things went badly. She’d been a bit off at the start, having more trouble than usual talking, or putting her thoughts into words, repeatedly pausing to sniff doglike. At some point during the conversation Chris made the mistake of reaching out to touch her and that had been too much. Whatever control she had over herself snapped and she attacked him. Thankfully, aside from a few shallow scrapes from her claws, all of the damage had been to his clothing, making her intent explicitly clear. Jill had been able to wrestle her away and drag her back to the basement cell block. Chris had helped, acting as bait to keep Clair’s attention.

After a few hours she recovered enough to talk, though not with her brother, and she remained humiliated by her loss of control and what she’d tried to do. The instincts the virus had given her were powerful and nearly impossible for her to resist. Even the smell of her brother or the sound of his voice was more than she could handle. At her own request she was kept in the cell until Chris had left the facility. Once the logistics of Sheva’s removal from the facility had been figured out, she, Chris and Jill left together. The next day the BSAA took Claire as well, with the understanding that Chris wouldn’t be allowed to visit her until something was figured out, some way to keep her from wanting to…

After that the facility was deemed safe for additional civilian workers to arrive, this time a construction crew and Barry Burton, who had been waiting anxiously and with increasing impatience to see his daughter again. Shortly before their arrival Leon had asked the Greek officials overseeing things what the plan for the Lepotica was. The response had been that it was up to him, seeing that the B.O.W. in question was in his custody. The Lepotica had given him an unreadable smile in response to that revelation.

So it was just it and him and Moira left. Moira who remained trapped in the lab she’d been put in in thanks to what had been done to her. The plaga that she’d been infected with had begun to mutate not long after bonding with her, an inexplicable process that seemed to happen at random. The researchers at the facility hadn’t been able to figure out why, according to the Lepotica, which had occupied its time by reading over the files on itself and the others, nor did they understand the mechanisms at work that caused the host to grow with it. All that was known was that the end result, a Gigante, a giant plaga, was extremely rare. They’d taken advantage of Moira’s situation, tried to study her, but they hadn’t learned much from it, much to Natalia’s frustration.

When Barry arrived Leon had tried to warn him about his daughter’s condition and done a poor job of it. Barry had stormed past him and headed to the lab where she was being kept. When Leon tried to follow the Lepotica had put a hand on his shoulder and reminded him that Moira was perfectly in control and not at all a danger to anyone, which was true. The plaga infecting her was obedient to her rather than the other way around, still, when Barry remained down with her for over an hour with no news, Leon had gone down to investigate. The Lepotica, despite having somehow ending up Moira’s friend, had stayed behind.

He found Barry sitting on the floor, holding Moira’s hand, really wrapping his arms around her fingers, as he talked to her, reassuring her that he’d get her out of there and everything would be alright. All Moira had been able to do was reach her hand out the door, and sob, she had grown too large to get out and Leon had no idea how she was going to be rescued. Leon left the two of them alone, or three really, because of the plaga. He had seen one of its appendages moving beneath Moira’s skin, but Barry either hadn’t noticed or didn’t care.

The next day he had his answer as a construction crew’s equipment arrived and they very carefully began to tear down the building above where Moira was. Barry had been asked to leave during the effort, which he had grudgingly agreed to do.

It took five days to get her out, by which time arrangements had been made with an elephant sanctuary in France of all things. They’d agreed to provide assistance with transporting Moira and a place for her to stay until a more permanent solution was figured out. Seeing Moira climb out of the partially demolished building and immediately grab a tarp to try and cover herself was hard to watch.

The Lepotica had gone over to talk to her and Moira introduced it to Barry. It was one of the most painfully awkward things Leon had ever seen, especially when Barry thanked it for looking out for Moira.

After that Moira got into the back of the truck that had been brought to transport her, Barry climbed into the passenger side of the cab and they were off to the sanctuary where the rest of the family was waiting for Moira and her new pet, as she and Barry had taken to referring to the plaga.

With Barry’s departure it was just him and the Lepotica and the cleanup crew and they hardly counted.

Aside from when it had been checking on Moira the Lepotica never left his sight during any of the rescue effort. Now that it was over he turned to it with a wry smile, “So, are you just going to vanish on me like always?”

“I suppose this once you wouldn’t mind that,” it spoke without a trace of bitterness.

“I…” he stared at the B.O.W., trying to figure out what he wanted to say, failing and settling for the first thing that came into his head, “It’s what you always do. I’ll just deal with it, like I always do.”

It was funny, they both knew, but they were taking such great pains to keep from saying it, even now.

“What if this time I didn’t?” it didn’t look at him, instead staring down at itself, silently reminding him that this time vanishing without a trace wouldn’t be an option, “I’m in your custody after all.”

He shook his head, “You’d be bored out of your mind during the trip back to the states with me and whatever comes afterwards. A lot of questioning I guess, and knowing you, you won’t answer any of them. I really don’t know what you see in me other than a dupe.”

“I never…” it started then laughed, an all too familiar sound, “You’re a lot of things Leon, but trust me, boring isn’t one of them.”

“Compared to you I doubt it,” he wasn’t sure if he was joking or not. Yeah, he’d been through all sorts of crazy things, but he never thought of himself as anything exceptional.

It laughed again a sound so genuine that he couldn’t help but recall those dark smiling eyes, the delicate face full of exotic beauty lost to the ravages of the C-virus, “You don’t really know me. When I’m not working I’m horrifyingly uninteresting.”

“I doubt that, Ada.”

There, he’d said it, made it real and nothing had changed, nothing was ruined. Or more ruined that it was already.

She took his hand in hers, “If you really want to find out.”

Yes, he did and they could figure things out as they happened. They’d always done fine playing it by ear in the past and as much as things had changed, they hadn’t.

“If you don’t have anything better to do.”

Ada shrugged, “Nothing I can think of.”

The same as always.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And there you have it. To everyone who read this, I hope you enjoyed. I do enjoy taking requests. Depending on time and circumstances I can't follow through on all of them, but if an idea really catches my attention I do try. I love doing trades and am willing to try a lot of different things.


End file.
